


dinero peso yen (lo quiero) i want in.

by sanlight



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Bad Flirting, Gen, M/M, but we been knew, jaehyun is all knowing, johnny is just here for the drama, nct are one of those cool systematic gangs, taeyong is all knowing too, the dreamies are deeply amused by all the crap the elders get up to, the nct gang au no one asked for, winil share a house before winwin goes and screws that up, yuta makes winil happen without trying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-09-13 00:46:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16882434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanlight/pseuds/sanlight
Summary: It's sometime after dinner, when he's finally wormed himself out of the conversation reigning at the table about doctors, that Sicheng approaches him. He doesn't make a noise when he pauses by the couch Taeil is sitting on, and hesitates briefly before sitting down at the other end. There's a sizable distance between them, enough for three of the younger boys to sit in between them, but it still makes the familiar thrum of his heart louder."Sorry I killed people in our house and you had to move to our HQ and share a room with four other people," Sicheng finally says, uncharacteristically fast. He must have practiced in the mirror, like he does whenever it's his turn to order takeout. "I was supposed to kill them a year ago on a cargo plane to Texas, but I forgot."Or: Moon Taeil, and the marvelous misadventures of accidentally joining a gang.





	1. i be shining, you be lyin'

**Author's Note:**

> Still, he thinks he should have known. Sicheng is Yuta's friend, and that itself should have been a massive red flag. Yuta doesn't have friends unless they're gang-related or the yakuza, and from the amount of hostile company in their house right now, Sicheng is probably both.

In all fairness, it's not like Sicheng ever gives Taeil a reason to think that he's in a gang.

For one, he barely talks. Any time Taeil is in the same room as him, he minds his own business and barely acknowledges his existence unless he has a reason to. He's always on his phone or watching TV on the couch. It makes Taeil nervous, mostly because he has a huge crush on Sicheng and doesn’t get why he’s constantly ignored by him. On the rare occasions that he decides to talk to Taeil, it's about the basic shit. ( _Yes, he fixed the faucet, no, he hasn't had dinner, no, he doesn't plan on eating either, yes, he did go out today, no, the landlord did not come over, yes, he does mind the markers Taeil uses while studying since they smell like blueberries and they make his eyes water._ ) Sometimes, the two of them would just sit in the living room in complete silence while scrolling through their respective phones, and within an hour or two, Sicheng will wordlessly disappear into his room down the hall. Sometimes, it's Taeil who leaves with a  _good night_ that goes unacknowledged.

For another, Sicheng doesn't look like he belongs to a high-profile gang. He doesn't have those obnoxious tattoos or facial piercings that Taeil commonly associates with gangs. He has light brown hair that sticks up in odd directions first thing in the morning when Taeil sees him make the walk from his room to the bathroom. His eyes are soft and his skin is mostly unblemished. On the rare occasions that he smiles, he looks pretty. All in all, he kind of looks like all Taeil's dreams come true, though he doubts that he's ever going to be thinking about that after  _this_.

Still, he thinks he should have known. Sicheng is Yuta's friend, and that itself should have been a massive red flag. Yuta doesn't  _have_  friends unless they're gang-related or the yakuza, and from the amount of hostile company in their house right now, Sicheng is probably both.

"Please don't kill me," is the first thing that comes out of Taeil's mouth when the knife presses against his throat. It's not Sicheng who has him at knifepoint, thank God – instead, it's some tall, tatted and pierced man that reminds Taeil of all the gang movies he's watched his whole life. He smells like cigarettes and cheap vodka, and if Taeil is being honest, he's not the kind of guy who wants to die by this man's hands.

Sicheng struggles against the hands holding him down. There's blood running down his torso, from a clean, neat cut made by the sharp tip of a knife, and he has a bruise on the side of his face. "Let him go," he snaps, eyes darting towards the man sitting on the armchair. Taeil hadn't even noticed him at first, too preoccupied with the sight of his housemate's blood on the carpet and the knife at his throat. Now that he thinks about it, the man looks like the Godfather, and is sitting on  _Taeil's_  chair.

"That depends," the Godfather says, and even in the dim light, he's got a pair of sharp, leering eyes. He meets Taeil's eyes and smiles, showing two rows of large, ugly teeth. "Who is he?"

"No one," Sicheng lurches again, trying to shake off the men. He doesn't succeed, but he winces when the movement causes the cut to open even wider. There are clots of blood forming on the carpet. He winces, but he doesn't waver. "Your business is with me, not with him, okay? Let him go and then we can handle it."

The Godfather smirks. He gets up from the armchair. At full height, he's taller than Johnny, and the ratio of his shoulders to his legs reminds Taeil oddly of Anton Ego from  _Ratatouille._ He walks very slowly until he's standing in front of Taeil. There's something foreboding about the way he smiles as a long, thin finger comes up to caress his face. Taeil winces when he says, "You're handsome, you know.”

"Hey!" Sicheng snaps again, and his voice echoes in the house. He struggles again, eyes narrowing into a glare. "Hands off him, right now!"

"I'm not interested in your leftovers, boy." The Godfather says, airily, and then turns to sit in his armchair. "Just tell me where your friends are, and that'll be it."

A bead of blood escapes the spot on Taeil's neck where the knife breaks his skin.

Taeil closes his eyes and thinks,  _dear God, I really hope I don't die like this._

And then, by some sort of godsent blessing, the front door is kicked down, a single gunshot is fired into the ceiling which had taken Taeil forever to fix after Lucas had kicked it to smithereens last summer, the sound of footsteps becomes louder, and then Johnny marches in, grins, asks, "Are those Taeil-hyung's shoes outside? You're fucked, Win," and doesn't wait for a reply before he shoots the strange men in the room one after the other, in a neat succession.

Taeil stays still for three seconds, first staring at the bodies and then at the blood Sicheng left on the floor and then at Sicheng's face. He seems fine, but winces and sags against the counter, hand immediately going to apply pressure on the cut on his torso. Their eyes lock, and Sicheng's entire body seizes up when he realizes that Taeil is staring at him.

A beat passes.

"I thought you had a date," Sicheng finally says. He’s been punched, many times by the looks of it, but he still has the capability to make Taeil’s heart stutter stupidly in his chest.

“I did,” Taeil says, not sure what else he can say. The real reason he came home early was because his date stood him up and he figured picking up takeout and eating it on the couch while Sicheng flipped through the TV channels would have been better than wait around for her. “My date stood me up.”

Sicheng stares. “What does that mean?”

“She found something better to do than listen to Taeil-hyung talk about nerd stuff,” Johnny says, not unkindly. He probably has a point, so it doesn’t hurt Taeil’s feelings that much. He hurls a jumper at Sicheng. “Now, put this on and let’s get out of here.”

And that’s how he ends up in the backseat of Johnny’s car, on his way to a funny looking warehouse Johnny tells him is HQ while Sicheng counts to two hundred in Korean so he doesn’t pass out from blood loss.


	2. i be grinding, you waste time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lee Taeyong, as Johnny formally introduces them, is curled up on a couch with his knees pulled to his chest. He seems even tinier than Taeil, narrow and small in places where a gang leader should be stronger and broader in. He’s got catlike eyes when he surveys Taeil, momentarily pausing at the blood on his hands and the cut on his neck. When he straightens up, he’s wearing an apron over the blue sweater and faded jeans. In loopy, cursive font, it reads, kiss the cook.

(He’d given himself four seconds to figure out another alternative for what he’s about to do, thought _oh, fuck it_ , and said, “Start again from ninety, your pronunciation was weird,” before tearing off a section of Sicheng’s jumper and using it to tie a pseudo-bandage around his torso. Amidst his mortification, Sicheng slurred, “I’m already on a hundred and eighty, can I _not_ start again?” like a whiny child. The blood loss must have been making him delirious, or maybe the gravity of the situation is making Taeil delirious, because for a split second, it almost looks like he’s smiling when the streetlight from outside spills into the car.

“Do I _have_ to start again?” Sicheng asks. Taeil thanks God that the sweater is huge and wraps it around Sicheng again, making sure that it closes the wound properly. Sicheng’s entire torso is bare, and even with the dim lighting, Taeil can make out the messy scars everywhere. When he doesn’t reply, Sicheng raises his hand and flicks him on the head. “Hey.” He never uses honorifics when addressing Taeil. Johnny is Johnny-hyung, and he’s even heard him say Yuta-hyung once. Taeil is still _hey_ to him, though, and for some reason, Taeil never bothers correcting him. “Do I start again?”

“Yes.” Taeil’s head collides with the roof of the car. It’s really cramped in the backseat. He’s somehow forced Sicheng into a sitting position but he keeps getting his legs everywhere, and his hands keep slapping Taeil occasionally. He’s close enough to smell the blood on Sicheng, mingled with the scent of the candle that’s constantly lit in their living room. “From ninety. I need you to stay awake.”

Sicheng’s either lost a lot of blood or Taeil’s going crazy because he grins again. “Alright,” he says, and then closes his eyes and starts counting again, slowly this time, with better emphasis on where it should be.

In the rearview mirror, Johnny watches them until Sicheng reaches a hundred and eighty again and Taeil meets his eyes. Then he grins, like he knows something Taeil doesn’t, and speeds up.)

∞

Taeil has seen a lot of things today, from a patient who came in with a pole lodged through her scapula while he was on his shift in the ER this morning to Sicheng almost getting them killed unintentionally to Johnny killing six people in his living room to the look of utter mortification on Sicheng’s face when Taeil had come to his senses and had done what he had to do to stop the bleeding. He’d seen the wide base built under the funny-looking warehouse, the boys that milled around when Johnny led him in, the way everyone seemed to know him even if he didn’t know them, the way they regarded him funnily while he rattled off the details of Sicheng’s injury to the doctor who offers to take him off his hands.

Still, this is, by far, the weirdest happening tonight. Taeil knows that his friends (?) don’t work for low-order, unknown gangs. He knows they have more power than either of them care to admit to him when they meet. He knows they’re well known enough to come into his ER with fractured jaws and broken limbs and bullet wounds. Lucas had once come in after someone had smashed a beer bottle over his head, and then admitted that he was the one who stabbed the person on the other bed. He’d had a lot of cash on him then.

He’d thought that the leader of their crew would be a lot more intimidating than _this_.

Lee Taeyong, as Johnny formally introduces them, is curled up on a couch with his knees pulled to his chest. He seems even tinier than Taeil, narrow and small in places where a gang leader should be stronger and broader in. He’s got catlike eyes when he surveys Taeil, momentarily pausing at the blood on his hands and the cut on his neck. When he straightens up, he’s wearing an apron over the blue sweater and faded jeans. In loopy, cursive font, it reads, _kiss the cook_.

“Uh,” Taeil says, eloquently.

Taeyong tilts his head. “I feel like I’ve seen you before.”

“He’s the guy who drilled a hole in Xuxi’s skull last year,” Yuta drawls, and it’s only then that Taeil notices him lounging about on the other side of the couch, his legs thrown in the place where Taeyong was previously sitting on. When Taeyong looks even more confused, he adds, “The train crash site. You were there, even if you passed out as soon as he pressed the drill to Xuxi’s head.”

Now that he thinks about it, there had been someone with Yuta in there, but that person had dark red hair and looked bony and sick. Then again, he’d also been caked in blood and had been impaled by a pole, so that was probably it as well.

Taeyong’s eyes are becoming more and more glazed as time goes on, and honestly, Taeil understands him. “Xuxi’s Moony-hyung is the same person as Winwin’s Taeil?” He asks.

“I told you this before,” another voice pipes up from his left, annoyed. It’s a blue-haired boy who’s frowning.

“I forgot,” Taeyong grumbles, and then turns to Taeil. “I suppose we owe you twice, then. Once for saving Xuxi and now for all the trouble Sicheng’s got you into.”

It’s instinct when he opens his mouth and starts to say, “Sicheng hasn’t caused me any – ”

“Hold that thought,” Johnny interrupts, fingers moving rapidly on his phone’s screen. “Chenle says the house is on fire.”

Taeil immediately thinks back to the rows of his books in his room and the unfinished studies he’s got in the living room. “ _My_ house?”

Johnny continues tapping. “Yeah. He says he didn’t see the faces of the people, but he says that the strongest bet is they’re the same people who broke into your house in the first place. They removed the bodies and set your house on fire.”

The thing is, he’s lived in that shitty house since he was twenty. It used to belong to his parents, but once they decided to move to the countryside and he moved into the city for med school, it was his. He lived with one of his friends there, until the friend moved out. All the money he made ever went into the stupid house. It’s creaky floorboards, the dumb leaky pipes and the bathroom door that never closed properly – he’d fixed all that, and then more. He’s twenty-six now, which means he’s been living there for six years.

And now it’s on _fire_ , along with all his things. The graduation gown he’d worn when finishing med school, the cap he’d tossed with his classmates, the photograph of him on the first day of interning at a hospital, the oddly-drawn card one of his patients had given him after he’d fixed the valves in her heart, photographs of him and his parents, all his med school notes and textbooks, all the things he’d gathered up over the years from his friends, birthday gifts and Christmas cards – everything was _gone_.

“Okay,” he finally concedes, when the silence becomes too suffocating and the tentative looks everyone in the room shoots him begins to feel like they’re burning through his skin, “Maybe Sicheng _did_ give me some trouble.”

Johnny hands him a tissue, and it’s only then that Taeil realizes that his eyes are watery. “I’ll ask Chenle to see if he can salvage some of your stuff. I’m sorry, hyung.”

Suddenly, he wishes he’d stayed around and waited for Mina. At least then he’d never have gotten held at knifepoint, and he’s pretty sure Sicheng would have handled the situation if he hadn’t been there. He’d walked in, and as soon as he’d seen Sicheng slam someone against the kitchen counter, he’d turned around to run out. Unfortunately, he got caught, a knife was held at his throat, and the man behind him grinned and said, “He dies if you try anything funny, Winwin,” and it all went to hell from there.

It’s not Sicheng’s fault. It’s Taeil’s.

Yuta taps his forehead. “You alright, hyung?”

“It’s fine.” It’s not. He’d never liked the damn house, but just the thought of not going back to it makes his chest hurt. “I’ll just – I’ll find somewhere else to stay.”

There’s a pause.

“Team meeting,” Taeyong announces, and Yuta shoots him an apologetic look in Taeil’s direction before moving out. Before the door shuts behind them, he calls out, “Jaehyun, get Xuxi here! Tell him to stay until I say so!”

Lucas appears just when Taeil is about to burst into tears, and he awkwardly bumbles over and sits next to him with a bright smile. He looks a lot better than before, the cut on his lip mostly healed and the limp in his step gone completely, and just the sight of him calms Taeil down. He’s technically homeless and just lost six years of memories, but he’ll never allow himself to cry in front of Lucas.

“Hey, Moony.” Lucas mumbles, oddly quiet. Out of Yuta, Johnny, and him, he’s the only one who’s ever seen the inside of Taeil’s house properly. One time, he’d slept on the couch when his car broke down and he had to wait for Yuta to come in. He’d eaten cereal at the counter, laughed at the photo of Taeil at his graduation, and slept with the Eevee plushie tucked under his chin. “Sorry about the house.”

He doesn’t reply.

“Let’s go wash your hands,” Lucas suggests, getting the hint. “They’ve got blood all over them. Did something happen in the car?”

He smiles when Lucas’ hands pick his own up to wiggle them slightly. “I got the blood on Sicheng’s jumper on my hands when I yanked it off him.”

Despite the situation, Lucas snorts. “I wish you’d yank my sweater in half, hyung. Winwinnie doesn’t realize how lucky he is.”

He smiles when Taeil laughs, and the way he does eases the pain in his heart slightly.

∞

“First of all, I’d like to start by apologizing,” Taeyong says. The apron is gone now, and it’s been an hour and a half since Taeil’s last seen him. He seems a lot more intimidating now. “It was not Sicheng’s intention to displace you from your home. Or set it on fire. Or get himself stabbed.”

“I think he gets it,” the blue-haired boy pipes up, before he could unintentionally dig Sicheng into a deeper grave.

“Right.” Taeyong clears his throat. “We’re really sorry about everything. It says a lot about you, that you _know_ about Yuta, Xuxi and Johnny and still never had them arrested and took care of them. We’re also very thankful for that, especially for Xuxi. He’s clumsy and careless –”

“Hey!” Lucas interrupts, offended.

“ – but he speaks very highly of you.” Taeyong gives him a look. “And we thank you for taking care of him.”

Yuta groans. “Fuck, this’ll take forever if you do it.” He mumbles, and without waiting for an appropriate response, he asks, “Have a place to go, hyung?”

“Not yet.” He hasn’t given that a thought. Lucas has kept him entertained so far, with funny stories and jokes. “But I’ll figure it out.”

Hansol lives with his girlfriend now, but he had a spare room he wouldn’t mind Taeil staying in until he found a place to stay. Rent in Seoul sucks, but he thinks he’ll handle it. He’s sure someone will rent an apartment with him at one point. Maybe he could stay in the hospital. It’s not like anyone notices if you live there anyway. There are so many people who look the same that they eventually start seeing the same person.

“Or,” Taeyong says, nervously wringing his hands together, “you could stay with us?”

That’s precisely the point at which Taeil’s entire life goes to hell, but he doesn’t know that yet.


	3. know you wanna roll with me 'cause you know i put it down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I wish you’d wear the black sweater.” Yuta opens the door for him and grins lazily, and Taeil is immediately aware of the fact that Yuta smiles at boys he wants to pick up the exact same way. “A little birdy told me you look really hot in it.”
> 
> Taeil’s exhausted, but bantering with Yuta is fun. He steps out of the car and sticks his head back in. “I’ll be sure to say my thanks to Yukhei.”
> 
> “Not Yukhei.” The smile on Yuta’s face changes, going from flirty to amused. “Someone else.”

“I’m still annoyed that you’re turning our amazing HQ down in favor of sleeping on Hansol’s couch,” Yuta says. He refuses to unlock the door to the car until he’s done venting. “I mean, I get that we do all sorts of shady shit, but I figured that wouldn’t bother you.”

“It’s not about your work, Yuta.” Taeil tells him, for the umpteenth time, because it’s not. After six months of working with Doctor Zhang, he can safely say that he’s seen everything there is to see. Yuta’s friends weren’t even the worst out of those people. “I’d just rather stay with someone I know.”

Yuta sighs. “Does Hansol know you’re coming?”

“I texted.” The reply had been, _you know where the keys are._

“I’d still feel better if I knew what you were doing,” Yuta says, and Taeil softens when he realizes that Yuta is still thinking about him. He’d told Yuta most of his history with Hansol. The real story is that Yuta had been bleeding out and needed to stay awake and Taeil had told him knowing that gossip kept Yuta thriving. The story Yuta tells everyone is that he’d charmed the story out of Taeil.

“I’m not going to die, Yuta,” Taeil says.

“It’s not you I’m worried about,” Yuta says, and before Taeil can ask him what that means, he’s unlocked the door. “Go, hyung. You’ve had a long day. I’ll come pick you up for dinner in a week.”

At the mention of dinner, Taeil visibly deflates. “I told you that wasn’t necessary.”

“Taeyong feels bad that we can’t do anything more for you,” Yuta says, like his leader’s words are law. After Taeil had explained that he’d rather stay with Hansol, Taeyong had insisted on him coming over when he was settled, as a show of their gratefulness. “And frankly, so do I. You’ve saved our asses more times than I can count, and when your ass needs saving, you won’t let us save it.”

Taeil sighs. “Do I bring anything?”

“I wish you’d wear the black sweater.” Yuta opens the door for him and grins lazily, and Taeil is immediately aware of the fact that Yuta smiles at boys he wants to pick up the exact same way. “A little birdy told me you look really hot in it.”

Taeil’s exhausted, but bantering with Yuta is fun. He steps out of the car and sticks his head back in. “I’ll be sure to say my thanks to Yukhei.”

“Not Yukhei.” The smile on Yuta’s face changes, going from flirty to amused. “Someone else.”

And before Taeil can ask him why he’s grinning so cryptically, he drives off.

↔

The police close the case of Taeil’s house about four days later, ruling it as an accident. He gets the insurance money, finds a relatively decent place to stay, and thanks Hansol for his help. The hospital pays off the cost of furniture and assembling all that crap. In the meantime, he only has the clothes he’d bought immediately after the fire, so moving isn’t a hassle.

Kim Jungwoo from work needs a place to stay, since his lease is up in a week and he’d rather not move in with his roommate again, so he also ends up with a housemate. He’s quiet the first few days, and then he gets chatty. He cooks rice and makes coffee and dusts the shelves before Taeil can. He’s quiet when he studies. Most of his interests align with Taeil’s – they’re both interested in the development of silicone hearts and the newest technology in medicine, so they have plenty to talk about. Jungwoo is a research doctor in the cancer ward, which is why he’s so fascinated in radiation all the time, and Taeil works in the ER, so he has a lot of crazy stories to share. Either way, Jungwoo is nice.

Yukhei gives him updates on Sicheng via text. They’re surprisingly straight to the point. _He drank his medicine and then vomited when he saw my face. He rolled off the bed and broke his leg. Update: he does not want his cast signed. The stab wound healed a while ago but he still has headaches. He’s on IV right now. Turns out he was skipping meals. He’s also on antibiotics. He’s still refusing the hospital like a big baby._ And so on. Taeil hadn’t necessarily asked him to check on how Sicheng was doing, but it’s just another testament to how well Yukhei can read him.

Taeil keeps thinking of Sicheng a lot these days. He hasn’t heard from him since he tore off his sweater in the back of a car and made him count from ninety to a hundred and eighty-seven properly, which shouldn’t bother him this much. They’re not friends. Sicheng doesn’t have to care about what he’s doing, or where he is, or how he’s doing. When they were living together, it didn’t matter to Sicheng whether he was there are not, so it made sense that he didn’t care now as well.

Taeil’s just a stranger to him, just as he’s a stranger to Sicheng.

So, life goes on. Taeil tries not to, but he keeps track of the days he hasn’t seen Sicheng anyway.

↔

(The first time Taeil had done something he was strictly told not to do, it was when he’d taken up Doctor Zhang’s offer to work in his hospital.

At first, he wasn’t going to do it. He was okay working at the hospital he’s currently in. It was his dream workplace since med school. There’s an entire ward dedicated to cancer research, and he frequently volunteers for experiments in the neurology department. He wasn’t a prodigious surgical resident – no one says his name with the same admiration and respect they often have when they say Namjoon’s name, or Hoseok’s name – but he was well-known too. He studied and worked to do better every day, even if it was difficult to do so sometimes. He had most of his classmates from med school working with him, he got a decent amount of attention for his efforts, Hansol was constantly around him because of the proximity of their jobs, and he had a good relationship with his superiors. He could say he was comfortable there.

Then, the train crash site happened.

Before Lucas, Taeil had never done a craniectomy on anyone. He’d seen the procedure multiple times, but all those times had been in an OT, with the quiet whirring of machines and the soft mumbles of his excited colleagues while they took notes. He’d been scared out of his mind as soon as he’d concluded that a craniotomy was the only way to remove the excess pressure produced in Lucas’ head, and when he’d reported his diagnosis to his attending over the phone, his voice had shaken so much that one would have assumed that he was the one with a hemorrhage in his brain.

He knew that his situation wasn’t the best. There were four other people in the train cart, a boy with a pole through his chest, another with his legs stuck underneath a sheet of metal, another completely unconscious boy with blood on the side of his head. (Taeyong, Yuta and Johnny.) There was debris everywhere. The noise from outside was amplified by the quiet in the train cart. The pent-up adrenaline and the fear that he could possibly kill someone if he didn’t do this properly made his hands shake.

Somehow, though, it goes without a hitch. Hansol, who was conveniently the paramedic who’d lead Taeil into the train cart, had given him a drill and watched him go over the procedure. Taeil wasn’t blind to how he kept closing his eyes to pray every three seconds, but he was too focused to call him out on it. It took a while for him to properly ensure that the section of the skull he’d been looking for was detached, and when it was over and the patient was finally deemed stable enough to be moved to an operative unit, he’d nearly collapsed from stress.

“You did it,” Hansol had said, still in awe. His eyes had been glimmering even in the pathetic lighting and his lips were parted, as if he’d run a marathon and come back, as if he’d been the one who just drilled a hole into a man’s head. It was the first time Taeil’s heart had flip-flopped in his chest for Hansol – the beginning of the end, if he were to say. Then, as if noticing that Taeil was staring, Hansol smiled. “You actually did it.”

He’d been stupid enough to mistake the admiration in Hansol’s eyes for something it wasn’t.

A week later, Hansol met Nayeon, and another three weeks later, they were dating and in love. Another four weeks later, he wasn’t talking to Taeil anymore unless he had to, and Taeil wasn’t oblivious to the funny looks he’d been getting from Hansol since then. Another week later, Hansol stopped talking to him outside their shared trauma cases completely. If he walked into a break room and Taeil was there, he just left. He stayed at his girlfriend’s place more often than not, their text exchanges became dull and terrible, and on the rare occasions they were together, the silence stretched on for so long that it hurt. Looking at them, one wouldn’t even be able to tell that they were childhood friends.

Then, another four weeks later, Taeil got the offer from Doctor Zhang in the form of an email.

He knew who Zhang Yixing was. He’d seen the news about the man, about the hospital he’d founded to help people where he never asked about the nature of their injuries. (Gang members. Runaways. Drug addicts.) He’d been the talk of town for years. He had friends who everyone knew was invested in dirty money. His husband owns the Taiwanese mob. He’d always been respected, smart and feared. He had connections all over the world and he didn’t have the cleanest slate.

It was the first time Hansol spoke to him in six months, properly at least. He never came home anymore, so Taeil barely saw him unless it was in the hospital. The familiar sight of Hansol standing at the doorway to his room nearly made his heart still, but the illusion was quickly broken when the first thing out of Hansol’s mouth had been, “You can’t leave.”

Taeil didn’t say anything. Instead, he listened to what Hansol had to say about it. Doctor Zhang helped the mob, helped gangs, helped runaways, helped all the people that needed to be reported to the police. He did things against the law. He was just another cruel man hidden behind a layer of perfection. Taeil couldn’t possibly want to work with someone who had ties to the mob.

He didn’t get why Hansol suddenly cared about what he was doing, and he decided then and there that he didn’t want to either.

The moment the door shut behind Hansol, he’d taken his phone and replied to the email.

Another month later, his transfer was complete, and he came back from the first day of work to find that Hansol’s things were gone from his house.)

↔

There’s a box outside his building when he comes back from work one day, and it takes both him and Jungwoo to haul it inside. There’s nothing outside it, save for the address and his name in messy handwriting.  He doesn’t recognize it. Jungwoo tears off the tape for him, and the flaps of box opens to reveal clothes.

Atop it, there’s a note which reads:

_Hey._

_I’m sorry about the house. Can we talk soon? I think I owe you an explanation._

_\- Sicheng_

The first article on the top is a black sweater.


	4. when i show up i'm the one and only (no, no, no)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don’t blame him for the house,” Taeil clarifies, just in case Hyuck decides to go and rave about this later.
> 
> Hyuck stares. “You really should. It’s all his fault.”

Hyuck is one of those patients who always yanks their cannula out long before they’re allowed to and make a run for it, so it’s surprising when he’s still sitting in the ward when Taeil comes back from rounds.

Taeil’s known him a total of three years. He was thirteen when he first came in, with bad trauma to the head after his dad had battered him with a baseball bat. Taeil hadn’t gotten to take part in the skull reconstruction, but the ortho doctors kept him updated since he’d been the one who’d taken the patient in the first place. Hyuck was thirteen back then, pasty skin stretched over hollow bones, underfed and beaten every other day, but he’d made it out somehow. He was gone as soon as the doctors deemed him safe, even though he was homeless. They’d brought his father in right after they’d brought Hyuck in, and the man didn’t live. All the man’s money was used to pay for the surgery. Hyuck probably had no idea what he was doing, but he never stayed.

And then he’d somehow end up in the hospital from time to time. The next time was when he was about to turn fourteen and the owner of the convenience store he part-timed at found him passed out at the foot of the chocolate aisle. He was underweight and dehydrated. An hour into the IV drip, he’d escaped. Small cuts and wounds in between, from field work and manual labor. Then he came back six months later, after a factory machine had nearly cut his thumb off his hand. Then another one month later, when he started working for a shady gang.

And now, nine and a half months since then, after he’d gotten knifed in a back alley.

“Hyung,” Hyuck greets, grinning slightly. He’s put on more weight since the last time, and he doesn’t seem nearly as tired and stressed. For someone who was brought in eight hours ago with a knife impaled in his abdomen, he seems almost happy. “Hey.”

It’s common knowledge that Hyuck won’t talk to anyone in the entire hospital unless it was Taeil. When Hyuck had woken up from his skull reconstruction, Taeil was the one who told him about his dad’s death. Taeil could tell that Hyuck hadn’t wanted to cry, but he had cried, a lot. It wasn’t like Taeil was a warm person, but when Hyuck had instinctively reached for him, he’d let Hyuck hold onto him until he felt better. After that, Hyuck would constantly ask for him. Taeil hadn’t wanted to get attached, but he quickly found that Hyuck was impossible to push away. Taeil let him call him _hyung._ He gave him taxi fare once, to get into the city. Eight hours ago, his heart felt like it had been dunked in ice when an intern had told him that there was a Hyuck in the ER with a stab wound in his stomach and knife cuts on his neck, asking for a Taeil-hyung.

“Hyuck.” Taeil doesn’t even know his real name, but he knows the way his lips instinctively curl into a smile at Hyuck’s expression isn’t what’s expected from him. He feels like he’s looking at a younger brother. “Not running away this time?”

“You’ve grown shorter, hyung,” Hyuck says, like he hadn’t heard him at all, and that’s when Taeil realizes that it’s just the morphine. His eyes are half-closed, but he’s still staring. “It’s cute.”

“You grew taller.” Taeil tells him, and it’s true. Hyuck’s grown too tall. When he’d rushed up to see him in the OR gallery, he’d barely recognized the tall, muscled young man on the table. Hyuck isn’t worryingly thin now – there’s a fair amount of muscle on him, some chubbiness on his cheeks. It’s reassuring, somehow, knowing that Hyuck’s been taking care of himself.

“I heard about your house,” Hyuck mumbles, when Taeil finally gives in and sits down on the chair next to him. His head lolls to the side, until he’s looking straight at Taeil’s eyes. “Didn’t know you were the doctor Win-hyung was staying with. If I knew, I’d have made him sleep on the streets.”

 _Oh._ “You know Sicheng?”

Hyuck, despite the grogginess, laughs. “He’s in the shady gang I work in.”

That explains it. Taeil knew that it was a vaguely familiar face cooped up in one of the chairs in the waiting room doing paperwork for Hyuck’s discharge – probably someone he saw while he was in their HQ two weeks back, someone he couldn’t remember because he’d been panicked then. It also explains why Hyuck looks better instead of looking worse – Yuta had told Taeil once, that they look after their own and build them up. They were quite different from others in their line of work – they seemed to care about each other a lot.

“I wanted to tell you,” Hyuck says, and when Taeil looks back, he suddenly seems a lot soberer than he really is. A lot younger too. It occurs to Taeil then, that he’s only going to turn sixteen this year. Hyuck laughs, a little weakly, just to fill in the silence. “That I was okay, you know? I wanted you to know that I was finally in a place where I wasn’t constantly going through near-death experiences.”

“You could have, you know,” Taeil tells him, not unkindly. He didn’t necessarily wait for Hyuck, since it means that Hyuck would be injured if he saw him, but he will admit that not knowing where Hyuck was really bothered him sometimes. “I’m always here.”

“I know,” Hyuck hums. Then he snorts. “The Winwin thing was hilarious though. Win-hyung woke up six hours after you left. Chenle told him what happened, and he nearly keeled over and died on the spot.” Hyuck grins even wider, like the memory is something he relishes. “It was funny. He tried to sleep the trauma off but it just made it worse. He’d wake up every three hours and stare into space before going right back to sleep.”

That … doesn’t sound like the Sicheng that Taeil knows, but Taeil’s already established that he doesn’t really know Sicheng, so maybe that was it.

“I don’t blame him for the house,” Taeil clarifies, just in case Hyuck decides to go and rave about this later.

Hyuck stares. “You really should. It’s all his fault.”

Taeil has been refraining from thinking about the house _and_ the strange note Sicheng wrote him, and all this with Hyuck isn’t helping. He pushes the chair back and gets up. “Alright, enough,” Taeil says, mildly, and slows down the morphine drip. “Rest, kid.”

“Hyung, call him back while you’re at it,” Hyuck says, flashing a teasing smile as Taeil moves to the door. “Everyone in HQ is going crazy because he keeps staring at the phone like he wants it to burst into flames.”

Taeil’s hand freezes around the door handle. “I’m supposed to call him?”

Hyuck tilts his head. “Isn’t that what the note said?”

Taeil stares. “No? It just said we should talk later.”

Hyuck pauses, opening his mouth like he wants to say something, and then quickly shuts his mouth like he’s decided against it.

“You’ll get it one day,” Hyuck tells him. He grins. “’Night, hyung.”

“’Night, Hyuck,” Taeil says, but when he looks back, Hyuck is still looking at him, like he knows something Taeil doesn’t.

↔

(The first time Taeil had ever heard Sicheng laugh goes something like this:

Sicheng is one of those assholes who feels the need to place all the measuring cups on the highest available surface after using them, which in the case of Taeil’s tiny kitchen, happens to be the top of the spice cabinet hammered onto the wall. Sicheng, with his long arms and model-like legs, probably had no issues reaching for them, but Taeil, with his short, pathetic legs and even shorter and more pathetic arms, struggles like hell.

That day, he’s trying to bake cookies. It’s for Yukhei, who’s sitting in the hospital with a concussion after driving a motorbike into a wall while Taeil enjoys whatever is left of his free day before he returns to work. He knows the boy is still sulking because he’s in the hospital. It’s also because baking is therapeutic. A destressing mechanism, if one were to say.

So he tries to reach for the measuring cups. He jumps, going as far as to try and climb the counters like he’s Spiderman, but they remain stubbornly where Sicheng left them. (Taeil doesn’t know why Sicheng was using the measuring cups in the first place. He’s been living here for maybe two weeks and Taeil hasn’t even seen him near the stove.) The stool is out of the question, since it’s broken after a horrible accident involving a very drunk Taeil and a very drunk Hansol about a year and a half ago, so he’s just going to jump until he gets it.

Sicheng is walking into the kitchen, holding his phone in one hand and a book in the other, when Taeil throws himself at the shelf for the ninth time without success. Except, Taeil miscalculates terribly, and he slams against the spice counter instead, and when he lands on his ass with an undignified yelp, he accidentally takes the bowl of flour with him. (He still doesn’t know how he managed to fuck up that badly.) The first thing he registers is the pain, and the second thing is that Sicheng is completely frozen at the door.

“Uh,” Taeil says, his blood going cold when he notices how fast Sicheng’s eyes are traveling from the shelf to Taeil on the floor with half a bowl of flour on his chest. “I’m okay?”

There’s a pause.

And then, just when Taeil is about to bury himself in a mound of flour and never look up again, Sicheng laughs.

It starts out with just a little curve of his lips. It’s barely noticeable, and he tries to play it off by sucking in air through his teeth and exhaling really fast, but somehow, it expands until he’s full on smiling. Then his lips part and he giggles, before trying to hold it in again, and then after a moment he just gives up and laughs at Taeil. He laughs and laughs for what feels like forever, even though it’s less than a minute. His eyes crinkle at the corners and his cheeks seem to be chubbier, if possible, and his voice comes in tiny hiccups.

 _Uh-oh,_ Taeil thinks, feeling his ears heat up and his heard speed up, _I’ve got it bad._

He’s still laughing by the time he’s gotten his bearings together and helped Taeil get the measuring cups, and the next day when Taeil comes back from the convenience store, the stool is fixed and Sicheng has splinters on his hands.

They’re back to walking around each other the next day, but somehow, Taeil thinks back to that moment anyway.)

↔

So, anyway: Taeil maintains that he doesn’t like Sicheng. There’s no way he _can_. He doesn’t know any of Sicheng’s likes or dislikes. He only knows the ramen combo Sicheng eats and his food orders and the type of handwash he likes at the kitchen sink and the fact that he’s allergic to the blueberry scented markers Taeil uses while studying. He doesn’t know his favorite color or his favorite movie or his childhood memories or how he sleeps at night. He doesn’t know if Sicheng is the type of guy who likes holding hands and dates on the beach, or if he likes indoors and movies and napping. He doesn’t even know if Sicheng likes guys, for fuck’s sake.

It’s a puppy crush, of sorts. He thinks Sicheng is hot and is intrigued because he never talks to him. It’s sounds dumb when he says it like that, but Taeil’s always had the tendency to crush on the ones who don’t give a shit at all. (Case in point: Hansol.) Basically, it’s temporary. It’ll go away.

He can just see Sicheng twice. Let him explain himself, and then at the awkward dinner Taeyong invited him to. And then, he can forget Sicheng ever happened and move on with his life.

But then Huang Renjun happens, which completely throws all of Taeil’s collective plans into a loop.


	5. yeah, pull up in the jag, haters gon' be mad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ll take them to the spare room,” Johnny drawls. He drapes his jacket around Taeil even though he already has one and grins at him. “I’m very supportive of his offer, mostly because hyung is attractive. Work will be bearable if I get to see him every day.”
> 
> Doyoung sighs. “Leave, Johnny-hyung, and please stop talking while you’re at it.”

There isn’t a time that Taeil can remember his old house being quiet.

When he lived alone, the faucet would drip, or the ventilation would splutter and crash in the middle of the night. Traffic from the road would be there, even in the earliest hours of the morning. The refrigerator would hum uncomfortably loud.

When he lived with Hansol, the alarm would go off every fifteen minutes starting from 2AM to 3AM. Hansol’s pager would go off at odd hours. His walkie-talkie would crackle to life from the living room. Regardless of the time, even if it was unnaturally early, he’d announce his arrival, loudly saying, “I’m home,” and laughing if Taeil responded by throwing a book at his head. There was the sound of books being shifted, the sound of his muffled voice reading his material repeatedly ( _the treatment for arrythmia begins with critical observation to ensure that it’s not life threatening_ ), taking a break occasionally to talk to someone on the phone. He’d also make a lot of noise while getting up, slamming the bathroom door shut and then flinging it open, humming in the shower every time. The noise, though, had grown on Taeil eventually, and when Hansol had left, he’d found it hard to sleep without it.

With Sicheng, the noise wasn’t as bad as it was with Hansol. He had a bad habit of sleeping with the TV on in his room. Taeil usually came home late, at around three or four in the morning, and the immediate first sound he’d hear would be the muffled gunshot noises and abstract yelling from the TV in his room. Some nights, he’d pace in the hallway. The sound of his feet against the floor always kept Taeil up. He’d be up earlier than Taeil was at times, and the whirring of the coffee maker would lull him awake on those days. He also hummed a lot. Taeil doesn’t think he knows he’s doing it, but it fills the silence anyway.

The apartment, on the other hand, is constantly in a state of silence.

It’s intimidating, if Taeil’s being honest. The only sound in the apartment would be either him or Jungwoo walking around coupled with the hum of the ventilation. Even the fridge was quiet. Neither of them watch a lot of TV, even on off days – Taeil prefers to sleep while listening to music with his earbuds, and Jungwoo has a Netflix subscription and a pair of headphones he can’t live without. At night, everything is dead quiet. Jungwoo sleeps in the next room without any shuffling – Sicheng, when he’d been the one in the room next to Taeil’s, always paced or moved around a lot. Jungwoo, if he’s studying at night, doesn’t read out his notes like Hansol did – he says he prefers to study by listening to lectures and writing down notes. Some nights, it feels like the beginning of an eerie horror movie.

So, when the sound of the front door creaking open and footsteps echo in the apartment at one-thirty in the morning followed by the sound of a gun cocking ominously, Taeil has every reason to panic.

Jungwoo, sitting on the floor of Taeil’s room with a book splayed on his lap, immediately moves to lock the door. He’s being really, really quiet, but his face is blanched white and he’s obviously scared. Taeil isn’t sure how his brain is functioning after hearing the gun, since the only thing in Taeil’s head since then has been _there’s someone with a gun in my apartment, there’s someone with a gun in my apartment, there’s someone with a gun in my apartment, there’s someone with a gun in my apartment._ At least with the incident in his house, he was the only one guaranteed to get hurt – now there’s Jungwoo involved, and he really doesn’t think his conscience can handle it if something happens to the other boy.

 _Do you have a phone?_ Jungwoo mouths.

Taeil shakes his head. It’s outside, along with his pager.

The footsteps come closer.

“Don’t you think this is unnecessary, boss?” A gruff voice asks, from outside. The voice is concentrated around the kitchen area, so Taeil can tell they have a short amount of time before they move to the rooms. “Our vendetta is with the boy, not with a civilian he used as a cover up.”

“The civilian was inside Neo headquarters.” The next voice is female. It’s also sharp and demands authority. There’s another click of the gun. “We can get him to talk about that, and then kill him.”

The civilian in question is obviously Taeil. The boy is obviously Sicheng.

Jungwoo has scribbled something on the paper using his blunt edged pencil. _What are they talking about?_

Taeil suddenly wishes he’d told Jungwoo about this already. _Long story._

There’s silence. “The civilian lives with another civilian.”

“We kill him too,” the woman says, and Taeil’s heart seizes up. Jungwoo, not having context but still understanding that _he’s_ the one they’re talking about, freezes too. “No witnesses, remember?”

 _This is bad,_ Taeil thinks, as Jungwoo tugs him away from the door and towards the closet, _this is really, really bad._

The next few seconds pass by in complete silence. Jungwoo makes minimal noise as he pries the closet door open and the two of them close it without a hassle. Then, they wait. Jungwoo is barely breathing, one hand clenched around one of Taeil’s nicer button ups and the other still locked around Taeil’s forearm. His grip is the only thing that keeps Taeil grounded – without it, he’d probably have panicked.

The lock clicks, and then the door to Taeil’s room opens.

“I never expected Sicheng to be like this,” the woman’s voice comes muffled, but he can see her. Taeil can see that she’s looking at the diagram he’d drawn while prepping for his residency exam – it’s detailed, colored and labeled, and he’d kept it exactly where he could see it every day so he’d never forget it. “Granted, he’s always been a little impulsive, but _this_ is unexpected.”

The man shifts some of the papers off the table. They’re his reports on increased frequency in GSW related deaths in their ER, for next week’s conference. The man hums. “Civilian’s name is Moon Taeil.”

The woman looks up. “Oh? That sounds familiar.”

“Works at Zhang’s.” The man places the papers down and moves away from the desk. “Look, we got his name. Let’s just go. There’s clearly no one here –”

“I know what you’re trying to do.” The woman’s tone is steely, ice like at best. Jungwoo exhales shakily and his grip on Taeil’s arm tightens. “You’re trying to protect Sicheng’s interest again. I keep telling you he’s not going to come back even if you do, but you don’t listen to me.”

“This isn’t _about_ Sicheng,” the man says, sounding frustrated. “This is about how we’re breaking into someone’s house with the intention of killing them when they have nothing to do with us. With all due respect, even if the civilian was inside Neo, there’s no chance that he knows anything. And his friend doesn’t even know what’s going on. We can’t just kill people whenever it’s convenient for us.”

The woman laughs. “God, you’re still in love with him, aren’t you?”

“Obviously,” the man doesn’t even hesitate. It makes something ugly stir up in Taeil’s chest, but he crushes it down. “But that’s not what this is about.”

“There were lots of rumors about him and this person, you know,” the woman picks up the book on the bed and closes it, carefully dog-earing the page Taeil was on. “Everyone in the underground was convinced they were fucking, at the very least. Some said Sicheng was _infatuated_ with him.”

The man bristles. “I know that.”

“Then I don’t see why you should have any trouble killing him, Yanan,” the woman says, breezily stepping past the closet. “I’ll look in the next bedroom. Call Hyo and tell him to check if this person is at the hospital.”

Footsteps, first hers and then his, and then blessed quiet.

Jungwoo is staring at him like he’s grown an extra head. It stings, but Taeil guesses he deserves it.

He closes his eyes and leans against the closet. It’s a tight fit, Taeil pressed against Jungwoo with a hair’s breadth between them, one of his hands gripped in Jungwoo’s and the other pressed uncomfortably to his side. Jungwoo is terrified out of his mind, but it’s clear that he’s guessing information contextually. Which, if Taeil is being honest, isn’t making him look too good. Missing context, it looks like Taeil had invited Sicheng into his life and his bed, which landed him in all sorts of trouble.

A few minutes pass like that. Jungwoo lets go after a while, but he’s still staring funnily.

“… Excuse me,” comes a thin, high voice from the doorway. Taeil doesn’t place it immediately, until he remembers that that’s the same boy who greets them from the next apartment over. He’s a tiny little thing, no older than seventeen, and while they never talked, he always made it a point to greet him and Jungwoo. “Did anyone order a hot plate of ass-kicking?”

The two bodies, the man and the woman, are slumped miserably on the floor by the time Taeil and Jungwoo stumble out of the closet and into the living room.

They’re still alive, but that’s beside the point. Even in the dim light, Taeil can see that they’re not in good shape. The man, blonde haired and tall, the one still in love with Sicheng, pulls out a tranquilizer from his arm. It’s completely empty. The woman is frozen still, the tranquilizer stuck in her neck.

It’s the boy two apartments over. He’s leaning against the door, holding a tranquilizing gun in his hands, and when Taeil looks at him, he’s grinning slightly. He’s got slanted eyes and big cheeks, and when he smiles, his eyes curve up. There are a pair of glasses perched on his nose.

“Hey,” the boy says, cheerily, like he isn’t the reason two grown adults are sprawled on the floor, paralyzed, “I’m Renjun. Taeyong-hyung sent me.”

And that’s how Taeil ends up in a car going to the funny looking warehouse for the second time in two months, while Renjun, sixteen years old and not the best driver, sings along to Iron Maiden and leaves the other drivers on the street with dust on their cars, and Jungwoo puts his head between his knees because he’s dizzy from all of it.

↔

Sicheng is anxiously waiting outside the warehouse when Renjun finally halts the car. He looks stupidly good even though he isn’t doing anything aside from standing. The streetlamp casts an orangish glow on him, highlighting the dips and hollows on his collarbones. Taeil’s always noticed how Sicheng is tall and lean, but he seems dwarfed by the clothes he’s wearing. He’s still in a cast, too.

He immediately pulls Renjun towards him as soon as the three of them are out of the car. He fusses over him, pulling at his clothes to check for bandages and rapidly lecturing him in Mandarin. Renjun preens for half a second before getting annoyed and pushing him off, snapping at him angrily. Sicheng then turns to Taeil and Jungwoo.

“I’m sorry about my brother’s poor driving skills,” Sicheng mumbles, awkwardly formal. He isn’t looking directly at Taeil. “He’s still learning.”

“I’m sorry you have to see my brother’s face,” Renjun says, also awkwardly formal, and then takes Jungwoo’s hand. “This one is looking peaky. I’m going to take him to Kun’s. You take that one to Taeyong-hyung.” He grins, vicious and teasing, and Sicheng looks seconds away from lunging at him with one of his crutches. “Have fun,” Renjun says, pulling Jungwoo. Too dazed to care, Jungwoo just goes with it. “The elevators might be a bit slow today. Bye!”

Then he’s gone with Jungwoo, in a flurry of colors and a cheery voice telling Jungwoo that it’ll be okay, leaving Sicheng and him standing under the streetlamp.

Taeil doesn’t look back at Sicheng, but he can still feel his eyes on him. It’s ridiculous because he knows Sicheng isn’t trying to intimidate him.

“You okay?” He finally asks. He didn’t talk a lot when he lived with Taeil, so every time he spoke, Taeil would remember how nice it was. His voice reminds Taeil of the feeling of falling off the highest point on a rollercoaster.

“As good as I’ll ever be.” Taeil should really be angry right now. He’s just gotten displaced from his own house for the second time as a result of the aftermath of something Sicheng had done, but he just can’t be annoyed at him. Taeil’s patience still isn’t running thin, which is a testament to how much he can’t help but be attracted to Sicheng. He shuffles. “How about you?”

Sicheng blinks. “Me?”

“Yeah, you.” Taeil hates this so much. It’s already awkward enough as it is, and Sicheng’s stare seems to get even more intense as the seconds tick by. “How are you? Still on crutches?”

“I’ll be out of it tomorrow.” Sicheng says, and then he tilts his head. “Why didn’t you call?”

“You didn’t specify that I had to,” Taeil points out. The truth is, after Hyuck had told him that he was expected to call Sicheng back, he’d thought of doing it many times. The contact was pulled up on his phone more times than he could count, and he’d almost tapped the screen many times. Still, he never ended up doing it. He’s not sure why, but the thought of hearing his voice always made him put the phone back down. Seeing the expression of thinly veiled indignance on Sicheng’s face, he adds, “You could have called too.”’

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want me to.” For someone who can barely string a sentence together in Korean, Sicheng really has a way with being blunt with his words. “Since I upended your life or whatever. I was giving you space.”

“I didn’t say that I wanted space,” Taeil points out, still watching the paint peeling off the wall.

“I wouldn’t want to hear anything from someone who ruined my life, so I assumed you wouldn’t either.” Sicheng says, like it’s that easy. He doesn’t sound guilty – just that he’s stating facts. Then he pauses, inhales sharply and says, “I tried to keep you out of it. I really did.”

The warehouse wall used to be blue. It shows under the peeling layer of white paint.

“You don’t owe me an explanation about your life here,” Taeil says, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket. All his clothes are from the box that had been sent by Sicheng, but he can’t tell if Sicheng knows or not. “So I understand.”

“I’m still sorry, though,” Sicheng mumbles. He’s still staring. Taeil wonders if it’s something he’s doing intentionally or if it’s something he does unconsciously. “About the house, and now about this. It’s not going to fix anything, but you’re involved with this now and it’s all my fault.” He doesn’t let Taeil reply, and instead tilts his head to the door. “Let’s go. Taeyong-hyung would want to see you soon.”

The first time around, Taeil hadn’t looked around much, mostly since he and Johnny had been supporting one hundred and seventy-five centimeters of Sicheng bleeding on them. Now, though, he has time to notice everything. The warehouse isn’t empty. It’s filled with cars and other broken machinery, and the lights are off. It’s cold and dark. Sicheng, even on crutches, is ridiculously fast. He gets to the elevator disguised as a telephone booth and ushers Taeil in. Within seconds, it plunges down and they’re underground.

They’ve made is past the first story when Sicheng asks, “You’re really not hurt?”

“I told you, I’m fine.” It’s dark in the elevator, but the flashes of light from the floors give way to snippets of Sicheng’s face when Taeil risks looking at him. He’s so good-looking that it’s unfair.

“That’s good,” Sicheng says, leaning against his crutches, and they don’t talk again.

Oddly, though, there’s some warmth in his eyes when they meet Taeil’s, and Taeil hates that his stupid heart stutters at the sight.

As always, Taeil’s the one who looks away first.

↔

Jungwoo is led into the office minutes after Taeil is asked to sit. He seems a lot better now. The resident doctor had given him a dose of medicine for motion sickness and Renjun had given him a polite apology, so he’s steady on both his feet when he sits down next to Taeil. He’s not half as freaked out either. Taeil doesn’t miss the way Lucas goes oddly still when Jungwoo flashes a soft, cordial smile at Taeyong when he’s asked for his name.

“Well, this time we can’t let you leave,” Taeyong says, lightly. He looks much, much more intimidating in his big, tall chair with a gun within an arm’s reach. “We’d hoped that our enemies would steer clear of you, since you don’t really know Winwin, but we hoped wrong. Winnie’s the one they want, but you’re the only one with any idea of his whereabouts these past few months, so they want you. And since Jungwoo is the one who knows where you are, it makes him demanded by proxy.”

“So essentially,” the blue-haired boy says, from his the slightly shorter seat next to Taeyong’s, “we’ll keep you here for a while. Under supervision, if you will. Just to make sure that no one dies.”

“Yes, what Doyoung said.” Taeyong makes a vague gesture. “It’s until we can figure out where the fuck these people are coming from and why they want Winwin in the first place. Once we neutralize the threat, you may go back to your lives.”

Jungwoo blinks. “I’m guessing the police is out of the question.”

“Too much publicity,” comes Lucas’ voice from the couch. He’s still watching Jungwoo unabashedly. “You’ll die in days.”

Taeil snaps back into it. “Renjun wasn’t a coincidence, was he?”

“He was a precaution.” Taeyong admits, reclining back in his seat, and then the corner of his mouth curls up into a smirk. “It was Sicheng’s idea. Thank him, if you will.”

When Taeil looks back, Sicheng is resolutely staring at the wall. The tips of his ears are a bright red.

“Renjun was going to keep an eye on you to make sure nothing too dangerous happened,” the blue haired boy, Doyoung, continues. He’s got a no-bullshit attitude, Taeil can tell. “Sicheng thought that it was plausible, so we stationed Renjun there. He didn’t make any reports of odd behavior until tonight, but they’ve probably been planning it for a while. We don’t really know the extent of their planning, so you’ll have to either take up this offer or die on the streets for a stupid reason.”

“We will respect your choice.” Taeyong says, stressing that point. “You can leave if you want to, but I will admit that I don’t want either of you to leave our protection. Doctor Moon has helped so many of us, from drilling a hole into Xuxi’s skull and saving Yuta’s dumbass and helping Hyuck long before we knew him and housing Sicheng, so we owe it to you, at least. And while we haven’t known Jungwoo long, he hasn’t done anything to be targeted, and it’s all our fault that this is happening to begin with.”

“You can give us a definite answer tomorrow.” Doyoung says, shuffling papers on his desk and pursing his lips. “For tonight, you can stay here. If you choose to leave, we’ll drive you back into the city tomorrow morning.”

Taeil glances at Jungwoo. He gets a nod in return.

“Thank you,” he ends up mumbling.

“Don’t thank me,” Taeyong says, smiling lightly. “This doesn’t even begin to return the favor for what you’ve done for us.”

“I’ll take them to the spare room,” Johnny drawls. He drapes his jacket around Taeil even though he already has one and grins at him. “I’m very supportive of his offer, mostly because hyung is attractive. Work will be bearable if I get to see him every day.”

Doyoung sighs. “ _Leave_ , Johnny-hyung, and _please_ stop talking while you’re at it.”

Taeil doesn’t listen to whatever comes next from Johnny, because he looks back at Sicheng, and Sicheng hesitates for a second before smiling at him, though it’s quick and barely there.

Taeil doesn’t smile back, but his stupid heart does a somersault anyway.


	6. i be walking with the cheese they say queso (queso, queso)

Taeil wakes up twenty-eight hours later, and the moment he rolls out of the bed, Renjun shoves a spare change of clothes and tells him to get ready because he's needed in the infirmary by a Doctor Kun.

He's the same one who'd been cramped into the tiny chairs at the waiting room when Hyuck had gotten knifed, signing the papers for his discharge and asking incessant questions about Hyuck's recovery time and precautions to be taken while he recovers. Taeil remembers seeing him only for a split second, noticing only the fairness of his skin and the neat, combed blonde hair and the sharp, trained eyes. Still, when he's led into the infirmary wing of their HQ by Renjun, he notices that the first instinct the blonde has is to smile and introduce himself.

"Hyuck snuck out of the hospital and won't tell me if he completed his morphine drip or not," Kun says, and Hyuck, laying down on the bed with sweat on his brows and obvious pain etched on his features, "Since you were there, I figured you could give me an idea about whether he'd be done by now."

Taeil can't help the disapproval that overtakes his features. "You snuck out?"

"I heard someone broke into your house!" Hyuck says, defensively. He crumples back into the mattress as soon as he jerks up too fast and hurts himself. Then, in a more subdued voice, he adds, "Someone was asking about you at the hospital counter. I had to make sure you were fine."

"That's not a valid reason to – Never mind," Taeil doesn't want to argue with a sick person right now. He can just lecture Hyuck's ears off later, when he's not tired and Hyuck isn't wincing like every word hurts. He turns to Kun. "The drip setting was a one and the drip wasn't halfway done when I left two days ago."

Kun purses his lips. "Antibiotics?"

"I took those from the pharmacy before I got here." Hyuck says, making a vague gesture at the plastic back ditched on the nightstand. "I know you nearly die when you skip antibiotics," he adds, petulantly.

"Alright, well," Kun moves swiftly, tapping something into the tablet in his hand, "I'm putting you on morphine again. I'll send Jaehyun to look over your antibiotics list and remind you to take your medicine on time. And in the meantime," his eyes flash dangerously, "none of your friends can visit you. You're _grounded_."

"What if I have to go to the bathroom?" Hyuck asks, cattishly. Taeil can't tell if he's trying to piss Kun off or if it's just his personality. "They only come here to help anyway."

Taeil tries hard to keep his mouth shut, but unfortunately, the overdose of sleep and the events of the last few weeks have made his self-control lessen. Before he can talk himself out of it, he says, "Hyuck, if you can remove your cannula and climb a window to escape a hospital, then you can wheel the stand with you to the bathroom."

Kun flicks his wrist in a _well_ , _there_ _you_ _have_ _it_ , gesture. "Rest up," he says to Hyuck, and ruffles his hair, "Doyoung will be here in four minutes or so."

Hyuck blinks. "You never leave me alone without a lecture after I sneak out of the hospital. Everything okay?"

"I wanted to spend some time with Doctor Moon," Kun says, and when he turns to look at Taeil, there's a sort of shimmer in his eyes, a shine that, oddly, reminds Taeil of the first time he'd seen a blood clot around a dead heart. "There's something I'd like for him to see, anyway."

"Oh," Taeil says, ineloquently. Johnny had promised that everyone would be welcoming, but Taeil didn't expect this.

"Only if you want to," Kun rushes, shyly. One minute he's authoritative and commanding, and the next he's a blushing mess. Taeil can't read him, but he thinks that's the charm in it. "It's not heavy work –"

"I'd like that," Taeil doesn't mind that he's interrupted Kun, and from the bright, blinding smile he gets, Kun doesn't mind it either.

Hyuck makes a noise between a scoff and a pained warble. " _Please_ , stop staring at each other like that," he wheezes, "it's disgusting, and I never want to see either of you do it ever again."

" _You're_ disgusting, Duckie," Kun says, ears red. He's cute. If Taeil wasn't completely and utterly trying to forget about the way his mind was constantly on Sicheng, Kun would totally be his type. He doesn't stick around for Hyuck's reply, motioning Taeil to the doorway. "Follow me, please."

🌺

Another three hours later, Taeil is standing in one of the empty stations in the infirmary with a blueberry scented marker and a whiteboard, making notes regarding the case Kun had presented him with.

It's interesting, to say the least. The patient is a John Doe with multiple injuries, including major head trauma and burn marks, but he's completely healed up now. The burns were replaced with skin grafts, the internal bleeding in his body was controlled, bones were fixed, and antibiotics were administered in case of a contamination. The catch? He still has traces of the drugs that were in his system when he got here half a month ago, and they won't leave. Their structures are impossible to discern, so it's impossible to see how they can get rid of it.

Kun had said that he's still working on drawing up the structures, and that he'd be more than happy if Taeil was willing to help. It had been an offer – he could have easily said no if he wanted to, but something in him had genuinely _wanted_ to do it.

"You know, I really can't figure you out sometimes," a voice drawls from the doorway, and Taeil doesn't need to turn away from the board to know that it's Yuta. He always has this condescending edge to his voice when he talks, and Taeil can't tell if it's intentional or not. "Someone broke into your house and tried to kill you, but less than forty-eight hours later, you're working."

"It keeps me busy," Taeil erases _potential_ _toxin_ and replaces it with _toxin_ _which_ _takes_ _effect_ _long_ _term (?_?) in loopy handwriting. If it were a toxin, that's a whole new headache. "You need something?"

"Not really," Yuta's eyes are sharp, trained to figure out the slightest hint of change in expressions. "I was surprised when Kun told me how fast you decided to go along with it. You don't seem inclined to do us any favors."

"The only reason I'm alive is because I've done you favors," Taeil says, finally sparing Yuta a glance. He's leaning against the door, gun in its holster, and he seems even more intimidating in the tiny station. "Besides, I have to treat people regardless of their circumstances. It's my job."

Yuta pauses. "You're really something, hyung," he says, grinning. "If you get sick of it, you don't have to do it." Then, without giving Taeil a chance to reply, he continues. "I hear you and Kun were making googly eyes at each other."

"I don't make googly eyes at people, Yuta," Taeil says, and scribbles _effect_ _on_ _RBC_ _count (?_?) in an empty spot.

Yuta snorts. "You made googly eyes at Sicheng."

"And look where that got me," Taeil wouldn't admit this to anyone, but Yuta isn't just a faceless somebody. Yuta isn't a friend, but Yuta comes damn close on some days. Once you've dug four bullets out of someone's abdominal cavity and replaced their femur with a makeshift titanium one and listened to them talk about how much they didn't want to die, there's no such thing as oversharing.

"He's cute, though," Yuta says, sliding into the room and shutting the door behind him. He doesn't even ask permission when he hurls himself at the sofa cramped in the back of the station, the entitled brat.

Taeil draws an arrow all the way from _potential_ _toxin_ to intl. _toxin_ _database_ and hums absentmindedly. "Sicheng? Yeah, I guess."

Yuta pauses, and when Taeil looks up, he looks like he's about to start laughing any minute. "I meant Kun."

"Oh," Taeil feels dumb right about now, but he's sure it can't get any more embarrassing than this. "Kun's cute too."

Yuta still doesn't laugh, but Taeil can tell he really wants to.

Instead, he says, "I'll let you get back to work," and gets up.

"I know you're going outside just to laugh and text Johnny," Taeil says, and he hates that his ears are red.

"At least I'm not doing it in your face," Yuta points out, and waves before shutting the door behind him. He laughs all the way to the end of the elevator, and Taeil suddenly wishes he'd just have locked the station door or shooed Yuta away.

🌺

"Holy _shit_ ," Kun says, as soon as Taeil is done rattling off the potential diagnoses scribbled on the board.

"It's all based on what the structure is," Taeil hurries to add. "You know, like if it's a toxin we could try flushing it out using normal techniques or even a drip. If it's something else, we can eliminate it by focusing on the chemical compounds."

"Holy _shit_ ," Kun repeats again, still in awe. His eyes are wide and sparkling with either adoration or glee – Taeil can't tell at this point. "That's – And you figured out all this in four hours?"

"It's probably not useful since we don't exactly know what the compound itself is," Taeil says.

"Yeah, but most of the bases are covered here." Kun points out. When he sits on the counter, his feet don't touch the ground. "We've got possible treatment plans. Did you ever think of going into research, hyung?"

"I did a lot of research on chemical components for my attending while I was at work," Taeil taps the marker on the table, "but I like surgery too much. It's challenging."

Kun is still staring at the whiteboard brimming with words. He’s trying to read it over and over again.

“I never understood why Sicheng was so fond of you,” Kun remarks, all of a sudden, “but now, I’m really seeing it.”

Taeil blinks. “What?”

“You’re handsome, considerate, and on top of that you’re genuinely intelligent and take your work seriously ,” Kun continues, like Taeil hadn’t spoken at all. “I can understand why he’s always looking out for your best interests now. You’re really cool, hyung.”

“Thanks?” Taeil tries, wondering unsubtly what the fuck was happening.

“He’s kind of a jerk,” Kun says, still skimming over the material, “but he’ll get it one day.”

“Get what one day?” Everyone here seems to know something about Sicheng and him that he doesn’t know.

Kun grins. “You’ll get it one day too.”

He doesn’t ask more on that, mostly because he doesn’t want to know.


	7. diamonds dripping better bring your raincoat.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Thank you, sir.” Jungwoo says, sincerely. “For coming to see us.”
> 
> “You’re welcome.” Doctor Zhang smiles, and for the first time since Taeil met him, it’s not icy. It’s warm. “Now please go out. If you see Taeyong, tell him to let my husband know that I’m in the car, and that I took the cat.”

Zhang Yixing is a graceful, elegant man, even as he sits on the sleek chair in Taeyong’s office with a cat on his lap. His sharp eyes are soft as he looks on and pets the soft fur, humming slightly. He looks the same as the last time Taeil had seen him – a neatly pressed suit, obviously designer, shiny shoes and the trademark resting bitch face. In the hand that’s not buried in the cat’s fur, he holds a ceramic mug filled with what looks to be berry juice. Outside the mug, in crooked, sharp letters, written either by a foreigner or a toddler, it reads: _Uncle Xing-Xing_.

“Doctor Moon, Jungwoo,” Doctor Zhang greets, not bothering to look up from the cat. He’d had the same aloof behavior during Taeil’s interview – he hadn’t looked at him even once, instead choosing to flip through the resume and the reports Taeil had drawn up, and then telling him to leave when he was done. “Good to see you’re well. Please, take a seat.”

Jungwoo is the first to move, nudging Taeil to do the same. The two of them still haven’t talked about it, but Taeil knows that Jungwoo isn’t annoyed at him. He seems to have pieced most of it together, and Kun had mentioned that he’d chatted with the young boys in the ER – Taeil hadn’t been the only one who’d helped around. Jungwoo, scandalized when he was told that the boys didn’t know first aid, had taken it upon himself to teach them some of the basic things. In the meantime, they also gossiped, according to Kun.

“Good to see you too,” Taeil says, figuring he needs to get his shit together and start acting like a rational adult. Jungwoo is still looking at the mug.

Doctor Zhang takes a sip of his berry juice. “You can relax, both of you. I didn’t come here to fire you.”

The _oh, thank God_ that escapes Jungwoo’s lips as he visibly deflates is a personification of how Taeil feels, but thankfully, the only outward sign he gives away is when he tension in his shoulders disappear. He’d been expecting to get fired when Taeyong had told him that Doctor Zhang wanted to see him – he hadn’t shown up to work the last two days because no one would allow him to leave, and his phone is still “unavailable for use” because Yukhei wanted to see if there were bugs on it. He’d assumed that that’s enough to get himself fired. It’s common knowledge that once you’re fired by Doctor Zhang, you never really get hired again. No one wants someone who’s treated the dirtiest of the bunch.

“Thank you, sir,” Taeil says. He’s always been a lot better at communication when it directly relates to his job.

“You’re the best,” Jungwoo adds, bowing hastily.

Doctor Zhang gives them a slight smile, eyes trained on the spaces between their shoulders, and is about to say something when the door creaks open. It’s the tiny boy who’d been sitting next to Jungwoo in the ER, holding two more cups of berry juice. The first one reads _Sushi Roll_ in scraggly font and the other reads _Lose-Lose_.

“Taeyong says to make it quick,” the boy says, setting down the mugs on the table. Jungwoo gets Sushi Roll and Taeil gets Lose-Lose. He’s not sure whether to be offended or not. “Dinner is in fifteen minutes and he wants everything to go perfectly.” The illusion of respect in his tone is broken when he makes a face and says, “God, he’s such a bitch when he’s annoyed.”

“Chenle, respect your elders,” Doctor Zhang says, mildly, but the corner of his lips twitch upwards anyway. The boy, Chenle, shrugs, and turns to leave. Doctor Zhang calls, “Tell him to keep those bloody guns away from my husband. We really don’t need any more at home.”

“Got it,” Chenle flashes him a thumbs up and shuts the door quietly.

There’s a beat of silence.

“So,” Doctor Zhang says, and his eyes zero on Taeil, “do you want to tell me what happened?”

“Uh,” Taeil blinks. He doesn’t think he can word this story without it coming off completely crazy. “It’s a long story?”

“We have time,” Doctor Zhang says. It’s implied from there that it wasn’t a question, but that it was a demand, and if there’s one thing Taeil’s always excelled at, it’s fulfilling demands from his superiors.

 _Well, here goes_.

“I used to live with Sicheng. He was my housemate for a while.” He thinks it must have been half a year or so that he’d moved in, but somehow, it feels longer than that. “Yuta introduced us. He said Sicheng was a friend of his who needed a place to stay since he was new in Seoul. So I let him stay.”

Doctor Zhang hums. “Why?”

 _Shit._ “Why what, sir?”

“Why did you let him stay?”

“I figured the extra money would be good,” he’s feeling anxious the more the seconds tick by. “And Yuta is a good friend. He never asked me of anything else, so I went along with it.”

Another sip from the berry juice. “Alright. Go on.”

“I didn’t know that he was involved with this,” Taeil says, fiddling with the handle of his cup. “He kept a relatively low profile around the house, so I didn’t – I didn’t think about that even once.” Doctor Zhang’s stare is intense enough to drill a hole into the side of his face. “Then someone broke into the house and tried to kill him or me or both of us, but Johnny shot them and got us out of there. Then he brought me here, where I was asked if I’d like to stay after someone set my house on fire, but I chose to go back to the city instead.”

“Pause,” Jungwoo says. Taeil guesses he has many questions, since this is his first time hearing this too. “The fire wasn’t a gas leak?”

“If it was a gas leak, the remaining buildings would have been on fire too, you know,” Doctor Zhang says. He’s still staring. “Go on, Doctor Moon.”

Taeil has never been this pressurized his whole life. “I, uh, used the insurance money to rent out another place to stay, and Jungwoo agreed to split the rent with me since he didn’t want to renew his lease with his old roommate. And then the other night people broke into the house because they knew I’d been inside here, but Renjun brought us back here again.”

“And you accepted their offer this time?”

“Yes, sir.” Taeil taps his fingers on the side of the mug and shakily takes a sip. It’s overly sweet and reminds Taeil of the fruit candy he’d been prone to chewing on when he was in elementary school, but it calms him down. “I didn’t see another choice. I don’t want Jungwoo to die just because I wasn’t smart enough to do a background check on who I was letting into my house.”

Doctor Zhang hums. “Did Sicheng apologize?”

“Yes.” Sicheng’s apologized so much that Taeil wishes he hadn’t done it in the first place. “Many times.”

“Okay, good.” His eyes are sharp, cold and calculating. Taeil had once heard someone in the ER say that they saw the devil in Doctor Zhang’s eyes once. “My nephew is, for the lack of a better word, a dumbass. I hope you won’t hold it above his head for a long time.”

Jungwoo sucks air in through his teeth, a true gesture of _you’ve fucked up bad, hyung,_ and Taeil _scrambles_. “I didn’t realize he was your –”

“Taeil. It’s alright.” Doctor Zhang is still intimidating, but the cat kind of kills the impression. “Sicheng is stupid. He’s young, and dumb, and thinks hiding everything makes it go away. It happens.” He places the cat down on the ground. “But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to discuss the status of your job. Nurse Kim, one of your patients was discharged today and she left you this.”

It’s a sloppy, glitter filled card. Jungwoo immediately turns to mush. “Her final treatment went without a hitch? Did she ask about me?”

“She asked where you were,” Doctor Zhang admits. Jungwoo seems to deflate. “But the cancer is completely gone. She told Nurse Park to tell you that you’re very beautiful.” Jungwoo laughs lightly, still flipping through the card, and Doctor Zhang turns to Taeil. “Your Hyuck escaped, but I suppose you already knew that. Your switchblade patient is showing signs of mobility, the chainsaw patient is off the breathing tube and the lady with the pole in her scapula was discharged an hour ago. I expect your report on the GSW cases to be written and mailed to me at the deadline.”

“The report was in the house –”

“Rewrite it if you have to,” Doctor Zhang gives him a withering look. Taeil immediately feels like disappearing into the ground. “I also expect to hear about the John Doe’s progress. I hear Kun’s got you invested in that.”

 _Invested_ is an understatement. “Yes, sir.”

“In the meantime, I’ll keep you updated about your patients, Nurse Kim,” he continues, before turning to Taeil again. “There’s an additional GSW case from yesterday. I’ll have the emails forwarded.” Then he shrugs. “When you come back, expect hell.”

Taeil can’t help the grin that overtakes his features. Hell meant rows and rows of trauma patients with various degrees of injuries, and he loved that.

“The hospital wasn’t the same without you two,” he adds, “so make sure to work hard and make up for your absence.”

A beat of silence.

“Thank you, sir.” Jungwoo says, sincerely. “For coming to see us.”

“You’re welcome.” Doctor Zhang smiles, and for the first time since Taeil met him, it’s not icy. It’s warm. “Now _please_ go out. If you see Taeyong, tell him to let my husband know that I’m in the car, and that I took the cat.”

↔

Dinner that night is a very loud affair.

There’s the obligatory round of introductions. Taeyong’s made everyone wear nametags, and even Taeil and Jungwoo get one each, and he makes a big speech about how everyone should keep their behavior in check around Jungwoo and Taeil. (“They’re _new_ ,” he says, pointedly ignoring the snickers he’s getting from Johnny and the laughter he’s getting from the boys, “so no one go around pulling guns on them, okay?”) His concluding sentences are; “Please feel at home, Doctor Moon and Nurse Kim. If you find a bomb anywhere, it’s probably one of ours, so don’t freak out.”

He meets multiple people after that. Jisung, the owner of the stolen cat who is sitting to Taeil’s left, asks him if he’s a regular doctor or a _doctor_ -doctor who has a scalpel all the time. Taeil doesn’t know what that means, so he just says that he’s a trauma surgeon and explains what he usually does at work. Jaehyun is another doctor, but he works mostly in the lab. He’s the one working on constructing the structures in John Doe’s blood. Jaemin is another boy, who is curious about his work since “it sounds lit” but has surprisingly insightful questions to ask. Hyuck makes dramatic retells of all the times he’s seen Taeil at work. It’s not as bad as he expects it to be.

It's sometime after dinner, when he's finally wormed himself out of the conversation reigning at the table about doctors, that Sicheng approaches him. He doesn't make a noise when he pauses by the couch Taeil is sitting on, and hesitates briefly before sitting down at the other end. There's a sizable distance between them, enough for three of the younger boys to sit in between them, but it still makes the familiar thrum of his heart louder.

"Sorry I killed people in our house and you had to move to our HQ and share a room with four other people," Sicheng finally says, uncharacteristically fast. He must have practiced in the mirror, like he does whenever it's his turn to order takeout. "I was supposed to kill them a year ago on a cargo plane to Texas, but I forgot."

The filtered light from the lampshade makes his eyes appear golden when he turns his head to look at Taeil. “I know we aren’t friends,” he continues, and the nerves in his voice is given away when it trembles slightly. His hands are clutching onto the arm rest, knuckles splotched as his grip tightens. “But it wasn’t right of me. To hide things from you knowing that I could have gotten you in a tough situation.”

“I keep telling you that there’s nothing to apologize for.” Taeil thinks he can hear the hushed whispers quietening down in the kitchen and dining hall, and the sound of violent pushing. “And you didn’t kill anyone in the house.”

“Yeah, but still.” Sicheng leans his head on the couch, exposing the long column of his throat. “It’s not going to change the fact that I’m the one who got our house caught on fire.”

 _Our house._ It’s the dumbest thing, to get hung up on something that simple, but Taeil’s established that he’s dumb, so he gets hung up on it anyway.

“At least we don’t have to spring clean,” is what he says, instead of the _why are you doing this to me_ that threatens to escape his lips.

Sicheng laughs quietly. It reminds Taeil of flour and the cold floor and the mended stool in their kitchen, of muffled TV sounds from the next room while he tries to sleep, of instant ramen for dinner while Sicheng laughed at something on his phone and Taeil read the news.

There’s a pause.

“Thanks,” Sicheng says. The tip of his ears are red again but he doesn’t look away, “for staying, I guess. I’ll do a better job of keeping you safe this time.”

 _Fuck,_ Taeil thinks, and he really hopes that Sicheng is utterly deaf to the sound of his heart trying to rattle its way out of his chest, _fuck, fuck, **fuck** , he really said that._

Sicheng doesn’t wait for a reply, instead choosing to get up and exit the room, footsteps carrying him all the way to the end of the hallway to the elevator.

Taeil doesn’t sleep very well that night, thinking about golden eyes and pink lips and sugared words, but he thinks that’s understandable.


	8. i got the racks on me (i brought the whole lit team with me)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He likes you quite a bit,” Mark finally says, eyes glimmering, and the way he smiles makes Taeil think that he shouldn’t ask.

The trauma case that comes four days later is quite possibly the best thing to happen to Taeil in a long, long time.

 

He’s not saying that a seventeen year old coming in with a knife through the shoulder is a good thing, especially not when he notices how pale Hyuck goes at the sight of the blood on the floor when the patient stumbles in, but he hasn’t had a trauma case in so long that he can’t help but feel the adrenaline in his veins when he moves to take a look at him. The patient, who Renjun introduces as Mark when he’s carrying him in, has a small Swiss knife impaled in his shoulder, and he hasn’t removed it yet. Blood clotting seems minimal, which means the knife hasn’t been in there for long and Taeil can carry on with the usual procedure of stabilizing the bleeding and wrapping up the wound.

 

Taeil’s mostly done research this whole time, holing himself up in the station with a computer and his trusty whiteboard, but even that gets boring at one point. He likes studying, but the only reason he became a doctor in the first place is so that he could do practical work.

 

He doesn’t say anything though, and instead gets to work with brusque directions to the nurses. The clamp feels amazing in his hands, and he’d almost forgotten the adrenaline that came with prodding at an injured person’s body.

 

Mark wakes up around three hours after the knife is removed and the tissues were fixed and the nurses have shifted him into the bed right beside Hyuck’s. Taeil is back in the station by then, back to scribbling about different GSW incidents taken place in the past year, but he gets a page. Figuring that it’s his patient, he closes the tabs on his computer and shuffles to the ward.

 

(Doyoung had given him a pager and a tablet, claiming that they could now share data without actually having to talk. He said it was for convenience, but Kun said that Doyoung was just antisocial in general.)

 

The first thing Mark does is point to Hyuck. “Is he okay?”

 

His voice comes out scratchy and hoarse. It’s either from the lack of use or because he’d screamed while getting stabbed.

 

“Hyuck?” Taeil’s eyes flicker to the next bed, where Hyuck has dozed off. He’d been awake when they’d brought Mark in, but someone must have forced him to sleep. His phone is on his chest and he seems uneasy though he’s asleep, hands clenched around the blanket. “Yeah, he’s fine. He’ll be discharged tomorrow.”

 

Mark visibly relaxes. It’s only then that Taeil notices the dark rings under his eyes and the way his cheeks are sunken.

 

“Okay.” He mumbles, quietly, and Taeil knows what’s about to happen even before it does. He moves, jerking his shoulder to reach for the water on the nightstand, and immediately yelps, no doubt at the wave of pain that hit him. His entire face scrunches up and his arm goes slack on the pillow.

 

“Try not to move too much,” Taeil advices, but he can tell that Mark isn’t the still type. Even now he’s wriggling his toes. If Hyuck annoys hospital staff by breaking out at any given opportunity, then Mark is the type to annoy doctors by never staying stil. Taeil makes a note to keep an eye on him and adds, “The wound is still pretty new, so physical exertion could cause it to open again.”

 

Mark closes his eyes, but as soon as it happens, they’re open again. He looks really confused for a second, and then he asks, “Hold on, are _you_ Taeil? Like, Win-hyung’s Taeil?”

 

 _I_ _should_    _stop_ _letting_ _these_ _people_ _refer_ _to_ _me_ _as_ _Sicheng’s_ _Taeil_ , Taeil thinks, suddenly wishing he’d just let Kun answer the page, _he_ _certainly_ _wouldn’t_ _approve_ _of_ _that_.

 

“I used to be his housemate, yes.” Taeil fills a cup of water for Mark, sticks a straw into it and lets him drink from it. The boy balances it precariously in his free hand while drinking, and his eyes are comically wide.

 

“Oh.” Mark says, when he’s emptied the cup. He blinks. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

 

Taeil glances over at the monitor. Heart rate normal, breathing rate normal, oxygen levels stable, no outward signs of pain. He hums absentmindedly. “Good things, I hope.”

 

The corner of Mark’s lips curl up into a dazed smile. “Wonderful things, actually.”

 

And there it is again. That _look_ , the one that says I know something you don’t. Taeil’s seen it a lot more than he's comfortable with lately — it was in Johnny’s eyes the first time he’d been taken here, then in Kun’s when he’d said he can understand why Sicheng is so fond of Taeil now, and then with Hyuck, and now with Mark. It’s like everyone knows something about him and Sicheng that he doesn’t know.

 

“He likes you quite a bit,” Mark finally says, eyes glimmering, and the way he smiles makes Taeil think that he shouldn’t ask.

 

✨🌙✨

 

It’s easy to find Johnny among the cluster of faces that constantly roam around HQ. He’s either always in the common room, playing games on his phone, or he’s sleeping in his room. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in HQ, most likely off doing gang business or partying, but when he does stay, Taeil knows where to find him.

 

“Hey,” Johnny greets. He’s sprawled on the most comfortable sofa in the entire common room, legs stretched over the pillows with his phone in his hands. When he sees Taeil, he moves his legs to make space. “You look tired.”

 

“I’m just bored.” Taeil just said that when he has two different cases to research on and a patient in the ward. He’s slipping back into his med school habits again.

 

Johnny grins. “Jaehyun tells me you’ve been working for four days in a row.”

 

“Doctor Jung is a liar. I took breaks.” Taeil doesn’t sound annoyed, mostly because he really likes Jaehyun. They’ve had a lot of opportunities to talk, owing to John Doe and their shared interest in chemical toxins. Jaehyun is an actual chemist, with a pHD and all, so he has a lot of insight to offer about 21st century medicine. “Haven’t seen you, Yuta and Yukhei much, though.”

 

“Xuxi is helping Jungwoo set up a computer in his room so he can watch Netflix and Yuta went for a drop off to Daegu.” Johnny says, placing the phone on the armrest. “And I’ve been busting ass to keep you, Jungwoo and Winwin out of trouble. Mostly Win.” He grimaces. “Everyone in the underground is out for his neck right now.”

 

“Are you supposed to be telling me this?” Taeil asks. Johnny’s always had a hard time keeping his mouth shut about gang business, always revealing enough to keep Taeil curious but not enough to endanger anyone.

 

“Please.” Johnny has the audacity to snort. “I trust you to not betray me to anyone else. You know this.”

 

A beat of silence.

 

Taeil thinks back to six days ago in his apartment, when the woman had said some even said that Sicheng was infatuated with him, and he shudders when he remembers the way she’s said the words.

 

“You know, the woman who broke into the apartment,” Taeil thinks he should shut up about this, but then Johnny hums, and he knows there’s no escaping it, “she said something.”

 

“I wouldn’t pay attention to it if I were y — “

 

“She said that there were rumors about him and me.”

 

Johnny, surprisingly, doesn’t even pause. “Oh, yeah. There are lots of those.”

 

“Can I ask why?” Taeil can’t ask questions about the gang, about Sicheng, and he certainly can’t ask about what Sicheng did that made people realize they want him dead, but he can ask about this.

 

“No,” Johnny says, and when Taeil looks at him, he’s smirking that oh-so-terrible smirk at him. “I won’t answer that. Ask him. He’ll tell you.”

 

“That’s not — you know I don’t talk to him unless I have to,” Taeil huffs. He’s aware that he’s pouting, which is surely unattractive in a man his age with his attitude, but he doesn’t care.

 

“Yeah, because you get nervous around him, hyung.” Yuta might be the only one who manages to wheedle details out of Taeil when it came to his infatuation (?) with Sicheng, but Taeil knows for a fact that Johnny is more than aware of it too. He guesses that those two gossip behind his back about it, but he can’t say he expected any better from them. After all, it does involve Yuta, and Yuta loves his gossip.

 

“I don’t get nervous around him.” It’s a lie. Taeil’s hands go clammy every time he’s anywhere in a six feet radius of Sicheng, his heart fading into a dull throb in his chest and his head feeling like it’s been stuffed with thick, heavy cotton. It’s not bad, though. It’s the same kind of nervous he’d been the first time his attending had pushed a scalpel towards him and asked him to make an incision, or the time he’d held the drill to Yukhei’s head for the craniotomy.

 

( _You_ _don’t_ _even_ _know_ _him_ , he’ll always think to himself at those times, but even then he never quite stops feeling so nervous.)

 

“If you say so,” Johnny says, cheerfully. He swings an arm around Taeil and pulls him towards the phone. “Now, want to see some of my plushies? I’m having them shipped in from Chicago.”

 

🌙✨🌙

 

When Taeil gets back to the station an hour and a half later, Sicheng is standing outside.

 

He’s leaning on the door, pale blue sweater a stark contrast against the dark black painted on it, and he doesn’t seem to be aware of Taeil standing a few feet away. Instead, he’s focused on whatever he’s doing on his phone, slender fingers tapping away at lightning speed on the screen. His bangs are in his eyes, but he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about it. It reminds Taeil of the time he’d locked himself outside the house and had to wait for Taeil to let him in. He’d been standing outside the house the exact same way then, tapping on his phone and hunching his shoulders like he wanted to be invisible.

 

“Hey,” he greets, locking his phone when he notices Taeil and putting it in his pocket. Taeil doesn’t miss the way Sicheng’s eyes linger a second too long on him. (He’s a surgeon. He’s equipped to find all the little things people often miss.)

 

“Hi.” Taeil says. They haven’t spoken at all since the  do a better job of keeping you safe this time thing. Taeil wasn’t avoiding him — he did smile at him once, when he was going in the elevator and Sicheng was going out, but that was about it.

 

Sicheng holds up the plastic bags in his free hand. “I got Renjun to pick up pasta from the place down the street,” he says, and when his eyes flicker to the ceiling and then back to Taeil, he seems ... almost hesitant. “Wanna eat with me?”

 

His cheeks are dusted pink.

 

God, my residency exam was easier to read than this, Taeil thinks.

 

“Okay,” he says instead. When he moves to unlock the station, his hand brushes past Sicheng’s ice cold knuckles. If Sicheng notices it, he doesn’t say anything.

 

Sicheng’s phone is back in his hand by the time Taeil’s opened the computer at the table, one hand quickly unlocking it while he opens the plastic container with the other. It smells like heaven. He likes the fact that they usually get food from the cafeteria (Neo has an entire floor dedicated to food stuff, which, according to Kun, is cool until you realize that everything there promotes heart failure with the ridiculous amount of oil in them,) but he’s missed eating this.

 

As expected, there’s no talking. Sicheng taps on his phone and eats and periodic intervals, Taeil does the same, and the only sound is the clicking of forks and the sound of chewing. Just like those evenings spent in the house, except back then, the tension between them hadn’t been this obvious.

 

Thinking back, Taeil only has himself to blame for the chain of events he sets off. The light from the computer is beginning to irritate his eyes, so he figures it’s time to get his glasses. Kun had put them on the highest shelf while he was here this morning, saying something about how someone might sit on them or break them out of stress.

 

Or maybe he did it to make fun of my height, Taeil muses. He’s standing in front of the shelf, and it doesn’t seem like he’ll get to the top even if he jumps.

 

There’s the sound of Sicheng’s chair being pushed back.

 

“I’ve got it,” he says, and when Taeil catches his reflection in the glass, the corner of his lips are curled up.

 

And by I’ve got it, Sicheng means that he reaches for the glasses without asking Taeil to move first, leaving a hair’s breadth between them as he steps forward.

 

Taeil can tell it wasn’t intentional as soon as Sicheng meets his eyes. He freezes as soon as he does, eyes widening slightly and breath catching in his throat. Taeil doesn’t think he’s ever been this close to Sicheng before, but now that he is, he’s beginning to see that he’s missed a lot of things.

 

Sicheng is so much _prettier_ up close. Not the cold, chic handsome Taeil is used to seeing from a distance, but a soft, gentle pretty that reminds him of the sound of wind chimes on a midsummer night. His cheeks are still a pale shade of pink, his nose a gentle curve, his eyes slanted and hawk-like, and even under the harsh lights, he looks good. His lips are the color of the roses that bloom in front of the hospital every spring.

 

But what _really_ steels Taeil to the ground is the look in his eyes. He’s watching Taeil like he’s the only thing in the room at that moment, and he’s definitely looking at his lips.

 

Taeil’s heart stutters, stumbles, falls and lurches, all at once.

 

 _This_ _is_ _a_ _disaster_ , the logical part of his brain thinks, but when Sicheng leans in, golden eyes hazy and dazed, and he feels cold fingers curl around his wrist, he can’t help the way his eyes flutter shut.

 

There’s a split second where Taeil’s mind completely clears up when he feels Sicheng’s lips against his. He’s not thinking about the dull ache behind his eyes from the computer, or about the ink on his hands or the scent of blueberries in the air. He’s not thinking about the fact that he’s got two on going research cases and the fact that Hyuck and Mark could probably see them if they tried from the ward, or that Sicheng’s fingers are deathly cold against his wrist.

 

When his mind does snap back into action, though, it’s overwhelming. Sicheng has one hand on his bicep and the other on his wrist, and even though every place he’s being touched in is cold, the rest of him feels like someone’s doused him in gasoline and thrown a match at him. The adrenaline is either from the fact that he hasn’t kissed anyone in a while or from the fact that it’s Sicheng who’s kissing him. Whatever it is, it makes his fingers lock around the baby blue sweater at Sicheng’s waist and kiss him back.

 

If there’s one thing about Taeil, though, it’s that his luck doesn’t really last.

 

The walkie-talkie, abandoned by the computer, goes off. It’s Kun. “ _Taeil-hyung? Taeil-hyung, something’s wrong. Can you make it to the ICU asap_?”

 

Kun’s voice seems to sober Sicheng up. He lets go like he’s been burned, eyes sharp and focused, and steps away. Taeil’s hands are shaking when he picks up the walkie-talkie.

 

“I’m on my way,” he’s surprised that his voice is so stable. Sicheng is still staring at him. Just to fill the silence, he asks, “What’s wrong?”

 

Kun inhales, and it’s obvious that he’s nervous, even over the radio, when he says _, “John Doe is awake.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh ,,, drop your twts in the comments ladies we need to Interact


	9. (bang bang) i might pull up on the spaceship, my body, it look like i live here.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaehyun blinks, like he hadn’t remembered either. “Oh, no. I was — I went to see hyung at the station but —“” he exchanges a look with Jungwoo, the tip of his ears pink, “he seemed ... busy.”

The moment Taeil stumbles into the hallway, he can hear the sound of surgical instruments being tossed around and Kun saying, “ _No_ , put the scalpel down before I wrestle it out of your hands,” which didn’t sound like good news to him. John Doe either had a scalpel to someone else’s throat, had one at his own throat, or had an enemy was holding a scalpel to John Doe’s throat. If he’s being honest, none of those options sound good.

 

He peeks in through the blinds to see what’s going on. It’s Scenario Two. John Doe, very much alive and very much breathing and very much shaking, has a scalpel to his own neck, mere inches away from his jugular. He knew exactly where he had to slash to kill, and he doesn’t look like he’ll hesitate to do it if he has to. He’s weak, underweight and paranoid, but he’s also scared, and Taeil knows that fear is enough to carry you through tough situations.

 

“Doyoung-hyung said to wait outside until all this is over.” It’s Renjun, glasses balanced precariously on the bridge of his nose. There’s a knife tucked in his pocket, the unmistakable shape of a handle sticking out, but his eyes are gentle and warm. “It might take a while.”

 

“How long as this been going on?” Taeil asks. John Doe’s hands are shaking, but the tip of the scalpel constantly finds its way back to his jugular.

 

“Six minutes,” Renjun says. Taeil watches Kun carefully step forward and then immediately step back as soon as the scalpel swings dangerously close, nicking at the pale skin on John Doe’s neck. Renjun winces. “You think he might actually do it?”

 

“Probably.” Taeil’s had plenty of these cases at Doctor Zhang’s. Some either didn’t want to be found again, didn’t want any treatment, had suicidal tendencies, and some just didn’t want whoever was after them to find them again. “I don’t know for sure, though.”

 

Jaehyun, standing in the shadows behind the bed, moves, knocking the scalpel out of John Doe’s hands and grabbing both his wrists before he could try anything else. He pulls until he has both of John Doe’s hands behind his back and says, “We can help you.”

 

It takes another fifteen minutes of convincing before Kun emerges from the door, looking like he’s been steamrolled on a tar street on a summer day. (Between Taeil and Renjun, most of that time is spent in silence, Taeil trying his best not to think about how he kissed Renjun’s brother less than half an hour ago (or maybe Renjun’s brother kissed _him_ , he doesn’t really remember anymore,) while Renjun spaced out and tapped the window.) Kun’s hair is disheveled, blonde strands sticking out in various directions, and his under eye bags seem to have deepened by a tenfold. Somehow, though, he still looks ridiculously good.

 

“Sorry about that,” he says, voice coming out slightly breathy. “I need to drink water first. Come on, I’ll fill you in on the way.”

 

There’s not much to say. John Doe is in his early twenties, presumed to be a member of another gang, has a history of several injuries including burn marks, stab wounds, and strangulation attempts. He’s paranoid, untrusting, and refuses to talk to anyone who is from the gang.

 

“He also exhibits suicidal behavior as you just saw,” Kun says, standing at the water dispenser and pouring himself a cup. “So whatever is wrong with him, we need to figure it out fast.”

 

“But you said he reacted violently when you asked,” Taeil says.

 

“Yeah, but he’ll be open to answering if you ask him,” Kun says, and that’s when it clicks. _He’ll_ have to talk to John Doe to figure out the origin of the injuries and the strange stuff in his blood, since he has no obligation to the gang. “You don’t have to do it, obviously — “

 

“I will,” Taeil answers too fast. He needs to work, or else he’s going to have too much time to think about the kiss, and he knows that won’t end well. “He’s my patient too.” Kun is still staring at him with that awestruck expression on his face, so just to escape the torture of being complimented by Kun for his professionalism, which happens quite a lot, he asks, “Know his name?”

 

“Yeah.” Kun runs a hand through his hair, placing the cup back on the dispenser. “It’s Jeno. Lee Jeno.”

 

🃏🎴

 

Near constant paranoia and shifty eyes aside, Lee Jeno, alias John Doe, is a surprisingly compliant patient once he’s convinced that Taeil isn’t affiliated with the gang. He doesn’t flinch when Taeil dabs the cut on his neck with rubbing alcohol, doesn’t wince even when Taeil accidentally pulls the bandages too hard, and keeps a straight face when Taeil asks him to rate his pain. Jungwoo, not affiliated with the gang and excited to work with patients who weren’t Chenle and Jisung with paper cuts and bruises after wrestling over who’s answer to the equation was correct, draws blood and fixes the IV properly and carefully makes a note of the vitals.

 

“I’m supposed to be a prostitute,” John Doe — _Jeno_ , he has a name, just not one Taeil is used to saying yet — blurts out, when Taeil is about to ask him if he knew what was in his blood. His voice is tiny, like the squeaking of shoes on linoleum, and when Taeil meets his eyes, he averts them immediately. “Am I one here? Is this where they sold me?”

 

“You’re a patient here,” Taeil says, going for the more neutral answer. He doesn’t know how Jeno got here, and he’s never asked either. Though he knows that there’s no way a place like this dabbles in human trafficking, he prefers to keep his expectations and hopes as low as possible so it doesn’t hurt when people let him down. He’s not going to say that they don’t traffic humans and then have to be disappointed if it turns out that they do. “You’ve been here six months or so, I suppose.”

 

“Oh.” Jeno mumbles. “I don’t — I can’t stay. I have to go back _there_.”

 

Taeil watches his hands fiddle with the blankets. They’re scarred, broken hands, like his fingers had been crushed under the weight of a dozen bricks.

 

“How old are you, Jeno?” Taeil finally asks. He doesn’t think he wants to hear the answer, but he needs time to formulate a plan as to how he’s going to get Jeno to stick around.

 

“Sixteen, sir.” He’s as old as Hyuck is.

 

At sixteen, Taeil was in and out of high school, struggling to lift the piles of books he often brought from the library and working at his uncle’s store on weekends. He studied, he played around, and he and Hansol got up to all sorts of trouble then. He skipped class, smoked his first cigarette, got his driver’s license, sang at school festivals, painted his nails a dark red because his sister wanted to practice her skills on him, went to prom with a girl he hasn’t seen in years and did all the basic high school shit. Meanwhile at sixteen, Jeno was supposed to be a prostitute and is currently on a hospital bed with cuts and bruises everywhere.

 

“ _There_ is the brothel.” Jeno says, breaking the silence that’s ascended in the room. “I have to go back there. I can’t — I can’t leave my friends behind.”

 

“Friends?” It’s Jungwoo who speaks up this time. His voice is soft, warm and encouraging.

 

“We were supposed to run away together,” Jeno’s voice breaks at the word together. “I — I was the only one who made it out. They took Ten-hyung back while he was opening the door for me.” He sniffles. Jungwoo hands him a tissue. “And I don’t know what happened to Yangyang. He was — I think he was screaming. And I didn’t look back. I didn’t wait for him.”

 

The silence that defends is heavy and feels like a blanket of ice.

 

“Hyung,” Jungwoo finally says, and when Taeil looks back, his eyes are on the glass door, “Doctor Kim wants you to come outside. I’ve got it here.”

 

Doyoung grabs Taeil by the arm as soon as he’s outside. Taeil is surprised at how strong his grip is, for a man of his stature. He’s about to comment on it too, but then he meets Doyoung’s eyes and suddenly wishes he was tiny enough to fit into the cracks on the ceiling. He barely gets a word in edgewise before Doyoung pulls him closer and hisses, “ _Ten_. Did he say Ten was his friend?”

 

Kun pries Doyoung’s hands off Taeil. His face is completely void of emotion.

 

“He did,” Taeil finally says, and Doyoung and Kun both flinch in tandem like he’d insulted their parents. “Is there something wrong?”

 

“ _Everything_ is wrong,” Kun mutters, darkly. He’s either hurt or angry or both, and it feels like the earth has been tilted on its axis when he frowns. Before Taeil can ask what was wrong, Kun gets up, brushing the imaginary dust on his coat, and says, “I’m going to get boss.”

 

Doyoung’s fingers slip back around Taeil’s wrist. “Hyung,” he says, and his voice is so quiet that it’s just above a whisper, “get back in there and ask him what that stuff is and how many people got it injected in them. I’m giving you fifteen minutes, and then we regroup at my station. Bring Jungwoo.”

 

🎴🃏

 

Three people, several doses a week depending on who it was. Jeno had gotten four a week, Yangyang had gotten six, and Ten had gotten ten.

 

“Ten-hyung liked running his mouth all the time,” Jeno’s eyes glaze over, “but the stuff made him quiet. He wasn’t himself after he got a shot.”

 

“Were you?” Taeil asks, not sure if he wants the answer or not.

 

“No,” Jeno shakes his head. “I barely remember threatening to kill myself just now. It’s — It makes me do things I don’t want to do.”

 

There’s a pause.

 

“Once I took a shot and went to sleep,” he says, quietly, “and when I woke up there was blood on my hands and an unconscious on my mattress. Someone had tried to come onto me while I was sleeping. Yangyang was the one who woke me up. He told me I’d been the one to hit him so much.”

 

Renjun and Jaemin, who are on watch duty when Taeil comes out of the ICU, immediately quieten when they notice the expression on his face.

 

“I don’t think you should be here,” he finally says. The two of them are doing homework while keeping an eye on Jeno, solving for x and giggling in between. There’s a tranquilizing gun atop their papers, and suddenly, all Taeil can see is their blood on the floor on the chance that Jeno went off again. “Can you get someone else to fill in for you guys?”

 

“Is everything okay?” Jaemin asks, already picking up the walkie-talkie and pressing the channel for five. That’s Yuta’s line.

 

“Please don’t ask,” Taeil think his hands are shaking, so he shoves them into the pockets of his coat and slumps over. If he seemed small, maybe they wouldn’t notice how freaked out he really was.

 

“Hyung, do you want sit down?” Renjun asks again. Taeil doesn’t think anyone’s told him this, but he has the same eyes as Sicheng’s. They’re big and concerned, the same ones that had looked at Taeil when he’d come here in the first place, and Taeil hates it so much. “You seem pale.”

 

“I’m fine.” He’s really not. His eyes flicker to Jungwoo, who is still inside, sitting at the bed with Jeno. They’d made the conscious decision to get the kids out of there and then move when someone more responsible came. “Can you hurry up, Jaemin-ah?”

 

Yuta and Yukhei are there in five minutes, Yukhei looking tired and worn out but still alert. Yuta’s hair is mussed up, like he’d been sleeping, but as soon as he’s standing in front of Taeil, the words, “Status, hyung?” are out of his mouth.

 

“He’s prone to getting fits of psychotic rage that he doesn’t remember afterwards,” Taeil’s formulated that sentence multiple times in his head, but saying it out loud still makes Jeno sound like some sort of monster when he’s just a scared little boy. “It’s the stuff in his blood. He says it makes him do shit he doesn’t want to do.”

 

Yukhei blinks. “That’s some Hulk level shit right there.”

 

“Xuxi!” Renjun snaps, followed by something in sharp, rapid Mandarin that doesn’t sound very polite.

 

“Enough.” Yuta says, and the room reverts back into silence. He sighs. “It was a good call to tell the kids to get someone else, hyung. I’ll stay. Xuxi, you go ahead and get some rest. Renjun, Jaemin, both of you get back to bunkers and complete your work. Don’t talk about whatever you saw and heard here today. Are we clear?”

 

Yukhei bristles. His eyes are red and bloodshot. “Are you staying alone?”

 

“I’ll contact Win. He’s around here somewhere.” Yuta dismisses. Then, he looks at the kids and repeats, “Am I clear, boys? Everything that happened here is a classified secret.”

 

There’s a pause.

 

“Got it, boss,” Renjun says.

 

“Understood, sir,” Jaemin says.

 

Their eyes are hard and cold, void of emotion. Suddenly, they don’t look like kids anymore.

 

🃏🎴

 

Doyoung’s station is crammed with people when Taeil and Jungwoo eventually get there. Taeyong is sitting at the desk where Doyoung usually works at, an unlit cigarette at his lips, and to his left, Johnny is sitting on the lower shelves, playing with a paperweight on Doyoung’s desk. Kun is reading through a file, either to occupy his mind or he’s just reading. Jaehyun is leaning against the wall on his phone, and Doyoung has his head in his hands.

 

“I recorded the conversation,” Jungwoo says, breaking the silence that’s ascended on the room. He pulls out his phone from the pocket of his scrubs and hands it to Taeyong. “Press play whenever you’re ready, I guess.”

 

The first ten minutes are just Taeil talking about how he’s not going to do anything unless Jeno wants him to. He hates how he sounds on record, but he likes to think that he did a good job convincing the kid that he wasn’t a threat. Then it moves on to the part where Jeno talks.

 

Then comes the first mention of Ten.

 

Johnny stiffens like he’s made out of cardboard when Jeno says, “They took Ten-hyung while he was opening the door for me,” and Kun gently pats him on the shoulder. He looks physically sick. It’s the most subdued Taeil has ever seen him. His hands are trembling and his face is completely pale, and he looks like his soul has escaped somewhere, leaving a hollow shell behind.

 

“You can go if you want to,” Taeyong says, eyeing him worriedly.

 

“No,” Johnny’s voice cracks. He clears his throat and shakes his head. “I’m fine, go on.”

 

Six hours ago, he was smiling and excited. Now, he looks like every breath hurts.

 

There’s a long pause when the recording has faded into a buzz.

 

“That’s so fucked,” Doyoung says, and when Taeil looks at him, his eyes are narrowed into thin slits at the book on the table like he wants it to burn. “Drugs to control people so they’d learn to fear themselves. That’s so fucking disgusting.”

 

“It’s _prostitution_ ,” Kun corrects. His hands are clenched into fists. “It’s what it is.”

 

“Same shit,” Johnny mumbles. He runs a hand through his hair. “What now?”

 

“We treat Jeno, obviously,” Taeyong says, and when Taeil looks at him, he’s tapping the desk with the barrel of an unloaded gun. “I don’t care what you have to do. Get rid of whatever the fuck is in his blood and help him. If you need money, I’ve got it.”

 

Doyoung’s eyes flicker to him. “The higher ups won’t — “

 

“I said _I_ have money, not that the higher ups have it.” Taeyong twists the gun in his hands, and then goes back to tapping. “And then we find Ten. And the other boy, if he’s alive. Ten won’t come with us unless we take the other boy and promise him protection.”

 

“That means we need to double up on infirmary stock,” Doyoung says, chewing on his bottom lip.

 

“It’s going to get pretty crazy around here,” Taeyong says, looking straight at Taeil and Jungwoo. “If you don’t want anything to do with it, you can say it now. We won’t begrudge you or ask you to help us.”

 

It’ll be easy, a traitorous part of him thinks, you’ll never have to look at Jeno’s sad eyes again.

 

“I’m used to crazy,” is what he says instead. It’d be easy to run away, but Taeil has never been good at taking the easy way out of anything.

 

“Me too,” Jungwoo shrugs. He puts his phone back in his pocket. “I’m stuck here, but I’d rather be stuck here with something to do.”

 

Doyoung hums. “That’ll lessen the burden on Kun and I when it comes to shifts. I’ll draw up a chart.” Then he pauses, like he’s just remembering that he’s supposed to ask this. “Jaehyun, did you tell Taeil-hyung about what you found out today?”

 

Jaehyun blinks, like he hadn’t remembered either. “Oh, no. I was — I went to see hyung at the station but —“” he exchanges a look with Jungwoo, the tip of his ears pink, “he seemed ... _busy_.”

 

“I wasn’t,” Taeil doesn’t remember being occupied with work today. At all.

 

“Hyung wasn’t doing anything the whole day,” Johnny says, and Taeil flinches. It’s different when he thinks of procrastination on his own and then someone calls him out on it. “He played a round of Mario Kart with me.”

 

“It isn’t my place to talk about it,” Jaehyun says, still blushing. “It was after he got back from Johnny-hyung’s.”

 

After Johnny? He went back to the station and — _oh, wait a minute._

 

“I’m so sorry you had to see that,” Taeil blurts out, and oh _Christ_ , he’s never been this embarrassed before. Jaehyun had seen him melt like ice cream in blistering heat when Sicheng kissed him. Jaehyun blushes again, his entire face going red, and Taeil wishes the ground would just swallow him whole.

 

“If you’re going to be apologizing to everyone who saw it, you might as well as apologize to Jisung, Hyuck, Renjun and Mark as well.” Jungwoo says, noncommittally. He’s amused. “Add me too. Jisung had a lot of questions.”

 

“I’m lost,” Johnny says, distantly.

 

“Me too,” Taeyong replies. Taeil can barely hear any of it over the blood rushing in his ears. “I don’t like not knowing. Jaehyun, what’s going on?”

 

“I really don’t think — “ Jaehyun starts.

 

“I’ll send you to work with Seokmin if you don’t,” Doyoung says, bored. Kun snickers when Jaehyun’s entire face goes white. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy explaining why you haven’t called him back yet.”

 

“You wouldn’t,” Jaehyun says. He sounds scared.

 

“I have Doctor Wen on speed-dial,” Kun says. “Try me, Jaehyun.”

 

There’s a pause.

 

“I — “ Taeil starts, going to say something along the lines of _I’m embarrassed_ or _I’d like to leave_ and abruptly gets cut off.

 

“Winwinnie kissed him!” Jaehyun says, very fast, but it’s not fast enough because everyone hears it anyway.

 

Doyoung squeaks. “Wait, _what_? _What_? I have so many questions right now.”

 

“That makes the two of us,” Taeil mumbles, but it goes ignored.

 

“He kissed hyung and not the other way around?” Taeyong asks, just for clarification. Jaehyun nods quickly.

 

“I owe Yuta money now,” Johnny scowls. The only good thing out of this is that he’s successfully distracted from whatever was on his mind. “Thanks a lot, hyung. You really couldn’t have kissed him instead? I’d be $700 richer if you had.”

 

“I can’t believe this,” Kun says, belatedly. “My brother _isn’t_ a useless coward. He actually did it.”

 

Jungwoo laughs. “Renjunnie said the same thing.”

 

“I’m sorry, hyung,” Jaehyun says, and he genuinely looks like he’s regretful of his own actions. “Doyoung-hyung and Kun-hyung made me.”

 

“Let’s just not talk about it again,” Taeil would rather they just forget about this conversation and move on with their lives. He wishes he’d been stricter with those younger than him, but he’s always been too nice and let them get away with things. “We have more important things to worry about.”

 

“Win has such a shitty sense of timing,” Johnny says, amused. It’s nice to see him smile again, even if it’s at the expense of Taeil’s humiliation. “But at least he did it. I thought I was going to have to wait for six years before he sucked it up and went for it.”

 

“ _Work_ ,” Taeil reminds them. He’s still not defensive and angry. Wow. “We have work to do.”

 

Taeyong grins. “Right, that’s enough, he’s right. Doyoung, have a copy of that chart sent up to my office. I assume you’ll take first shift?”

 

Doyoung hums. “Yeah.”

 

“Cool. Put me down for guard duty, then.” He picks up his gun. “The rest of you get some sleep. I’ll have someone wake you up when it’s your turn.”

 

“Yes, sir.” Jaehyun says.

 

“Got it,” Kun nods.

 

“Understood,” Jungwoo hums.

 

“Okay,” Taeil says.

 

“Good,” Taeyong nods. “Let’s do this, everyone. We have several lives to save.”


	10. and now we in the zone (stand too close might catch a cold.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Oh. Okay.” Jaehyun fixes his glasses and sighs. “I still can’t believe Kun is holding a grudge over it. It’s been years.”
> 
> Doyoung shrugs. “You’d hold a grudge too if you found out the person you were in love with was actually still in love with his ex and only pretending to love you back so he wouldn’t have to break your heart.”

Doyoung is fast asleep on the gurney outside Jeno’s room when Taeil goes to take over for him. His scrubs are crumpled up and his hair is sticking up in different directions like he’d tried to pull at it to keep himself awake overnight. His legs are hanging off the edge and the tips of his fingers are clutched around his stethoscope.

 

“That’s what the aftermath of a category four hurricane looks like,” Yukhei says, unhelpfully.

 

For safety reasons, Taeyong insisted that there be one of the other members with the doctors while they were dealing with Jeno. It’s only been four days since then and Taeil’s been with Yuta, Johnny and now apparently Yukhei. It’s nice having the company of someone else while watching a sleeping kid to make sure he doesn’t die. It humanizes the situation, sort of.

 

“Jeno gave him trouble again?” Taeil asks. There’s little to know about Jeno aside from the fact that he can’t stand cold cucumber soup and Doyoung. So far in the last four days, Doyoung has yelled at Jeno in three separate occasions, Jeno has yelled at Doyoung four times, and they’ve both ended up having to apologize to each other by an exhausted Kun.

 

“He refused his daily shot and hyung got annoyed,” Yukhei makes a face. “I didn’t think Doyoung-hyung could get that aggressive. Apparently, he can.”

 

There’s a pause.

 

“I’m going to wheel him up to the boss man’s room,” Yukhei says, getting up and pocketing his phone. He looks tired too, like he hasn’t caught a wink of sleep since this whole ordeal began. “I think my replacement should be here soon.”

 

Taeil blinks. “You’re not staying?”

 

“I have a stake out tomorrow,” Yukhei’s face scrunches up at the words. “So no, sorry, Moony.”

 

“That’s okay,” he smiles. Yukhei visibly relaxes at that. “Get some rest.”

 

“Bye, Lucas,” Jeno adds, weakly from his bed. Taeil hadn’t even realized he was awake, and when he meets Jeno’s eyes, Jeno waves at him. “Good morning, Doctor Moon. I’m going back to sleep.”

 

He’s just like a normal kid when he’s like this, but then the medication fucks him up once every few hours and he turns into something scary. Taeil smiles and waves back at him.

 

“Night, Jeno.” Yukhei calls, and then he’s gone. On his way out, he drags the gurney Doyoung is on with one hand and pulls it towards the elevator. He moves fast, bumping it against the walls and the abandoned rolls of bandages on the ground, but for some reason, Doyoung doesn’t as much as flinch. If anything, the snoring intensifies.

 

They’d learned the first night not to leave Jeno alone, after an ill-timed seizure and a terribly anxiety attack that had scared everyone. Kun had taken it badly, since he’d been the one who’d left Jeno alone in the first place. Now there’s always one of them around Jeno, just to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

 

It’s a necessity, but that didn’t make it any less boring.

 

Night shifts are the absolute worst.

 

Jaehyun’s confident they’ll find something to fix Jeno’s blood composition. In four days he’d somehow reconstructed the substance, injected it into mice, and successfully made notes about it’s behavioral patterns before and after intake. He says it’s really not that impressive, but honestly, it’s the coolest thing Taeil has seen in years.

 

Several minutes pass. Jeno is snoring quietly.

 

Taeil makes himself comfortable on the beanbag Yuta had carried in and takes out his phone to. He’d gotten his beat up android from Chenle the other day, and had been mildly insulted when the younger boy had said, “I didn’t even know they made these anymore,” with a scrunched up nose. The truth is, he’d been meaning to upgrade his phone, but between the soap opera his whole life has become, the last of his concern has been what kind of phone he has.

 

Taeil is half way through the article about Mariah Carey’s new fling when he hears the sound of surgical instruments clattering against the marble floor of the OR are directly adjacent to the room he’s in. There’s a hiss of, “Ow, fucking watch it, jackass,” and then the sound of people jostling.

 

“I am watching it, you fuck,” comes another voice. This one is deeper, and slightly quieter too. “Are we even in the right place? Qin-ge, is this where you’re supposed to be?”

 

“I can’t tell,” the third voice says, “it’s too dark.”

 

“The Winwin bastard said the trail should lead us straight into the HQ,” the second voice pipes up again. “This looks more like a hospital.”

 

“ ... What if we walked into their torture chamber?” That’s the first voice. “Where they drive people crazy with videos of their loved ones dying and then convince them that they’re going crazy in a mental asylum.”

 

“Get real, dumbass,” the second voice hisses. Then the footsteps halt. “Oh? A light is on. There.”

 

“Where?” The third voice.

 

“To your left. Can you see?”

 

Amidst the hustle, it occurs to Taeil that he should really call someone. He picks up the walkie-talkie discarded on the table and presses the line for six. It’s the silent beacon. (Yukhei named it, apparently.) Barely a minute passes before the screen flashes with help is on its way.

 

“ ... Ge, I can’t lift Yangyang up if you’re holding on to me.” The first voice.

 

“You can’t lift Yangyang up anyway, Tiny,” that’s the second voice. “I’ve got him, you hold onto Qin-ge. If you let go of him, he’s probably going to try something, so don’t let go.”

 

The third voice lets out a dry laugh. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but if I wanted to kill you both, you’d be dead by now.”

 

“That’s reassuring,” Tiny says. A slight, minute pause resonates, but not for too long. “You think Winwin lied? About the initiation?”

 

“If he did, we’ll just have to hop on to the next cargo ship to Macau. Nowhere here for us, then.”

 

Tiny visibly gags. “Ugh, drug work again. Gross.”

 

The third voice hums. “It’s better than prostitution.”

 

Tiny laughs. “Shit. You’re right about that, ge.”

 

There’s the sound of lights turning on outside, and then the all too familiar click of a gun. The footsteps and the voices halt immediately.

 

“State your names and the code you were given, please.” It’s Mark, his voice completely flat. Taeil peers outside to find him facing a cluster of boys, one of them short and holding up another boy while the other stands tall with an unconscious figure on his back.

 

There’s a pause. The air seems to become more tense as the seconds tick by.

 

“Hendery and Xiaojun,” one of the boys finally says, “Code 116.”

 

Another pause.

 

“Ten.” Taeil recognizes the boy being held up as the third voice. Mark visibly flinches at the mention of the name, recoiling like he’s been burnt. “Code 000.” His lips curl upwards. “It’s good to see you again, Mark. Now take me to the boss, please.”

 

🌃🏙

 

Kun is in a terrible mood the whole day after that.

 

He curses when he walks into a wall, glares at Jeno when he refuses to drink his soup, snaps at Doyoung twice when he asks him why he’s being so fucking angry, and glares at Renjun until he leaves when he tries to ask him to come out with him, possibly in an attempt to cheer him up. He glares at Tiny — Xiaojun — when the boy asks if he can be a little more gentle while stitching him up, yells at Hyuck for “breathing too loud,” and when Yuta drops by to see what’s going on, he points a scalpel at him until he gets intimidated enough to leave.

 

Sicheng appears from the deepest, darkest corner of Hell (the eleventh floor of HQ, where all the computers are) at around half past six in the evening. Taeil hasn’t seen him at all since the tragically timed kiss. He’s either been making a conscious effort to avoid Taeil or their schedules really don’t match. Still, he pauses at the door to look at Taeil when he comes to get Kun, but the moment their eyes meet, he looks away and grabs Kun and disappears again.

 

“He’s trying to fix Kunnie’s attitude issue,” Doyoung says, sliding into the seat next to Taeil. He has an X-Ray of someone’s arm. It’s broken in three places. “Before Johnny hears about it, you know.”

 

“I don’t know,” Taeil shrugs. Sometimes they seem to forget that he’s virtually a stranger to them, and the worst part is that sometimes he doesn’t remember that either.

 

Doyoung snorts. “It’s not a secret. I’m surprised one of the kids hasn’t spilled it yet.” He flicks the X-Ray. It makes a wonderful, soothing sound. “Johnny and Ten used to date, then Ten left us and in his place we introduced Kun for manpower. Then Johnny dated Kun.”

 

Taeil pauses, his fingers skidding to a halt on the keyboard. “You mean, Johnny used Kun as a rebound?”

 

Doyoung points the X-Ray at the light on the ceiling. “Spot on,” he says. “They had a bad fall out. Kun never really got over it. Johnny tries to fix it, but Kun makes sure to never let him have the chance to try for longer than two seconds by not staying in the same room as him unless he has to.”

 

“Are you two gossiping about Johnny and Kun?” Jaehyun asks, wheeling his chair towards them.

 

“Yeah,” Doyoung says, unabashedly.

 

“Oh. Okay.” Jaehyun fixes his glasses and sighs. “I still can’t believe Kun is holding a grudge over it. It’s been years.”

 

Doyoung shrugs. “You’d hold a grudge too if you found out the person you were in love with was actually still in love with his ex and only pretending to love you back so he wouldn’t have to break your heart.”

 

Taeil nearly winces. “That’s shitty.”

 

“Taeyong-hyung says he can still hear their phantom voices yelling at each other every time the sixth of February rolls around.” Doyoung comments. “I love Johnny to pieces but I have no idea what possessed him to do that to Kun.”

 

“I wanted to ask him about it,” Jaehyun admits, “like, really badly. But we weren’t close back then so I couldn’t do it. And by the time we became close, they were both acting like nothing happened.”

 

There’s a pause.

 

“I don’t really blame Kun, though.” Taeil finally says. “For being that way, I guess.”

 

“No one does.” Doyoung shrugs. He picks up the X-ray and makes a move to leave. “I’m going to take a better look at Hendery’s arm. You’ve got Jeno, right hyung?”

 

Taeil hums. “Yeah.” Then, remembering that he was helping Jaehyun, he turns to the other boy, “Do you need me to stay?”

 

“No, but thanks for offering,” Jaehyun smiles. He has dimples when he does so. It’s actually really cute. “Go on. I’ll page you if I need you.”

 

🏙🌃

Another few hours pass with minimal chaos. Jeno wakes up, but he’s too tired to do anything else aside from open his eyes so he goes right back to sleep. Taeil doesn’t tell him about Ten, or about Yangyang. He’s not sure why, but he can tell that there’s something sinister related to the two of them being here, and he doesn’t want to push his boundaries. He can’t risk pushing Jeno to another one of his self destructive episodes.

 

Jaemin and Renjun are with him. It’s cold in the room because Jeno can’t sleep if it’s too hot, and Renjun is visibly shivering. It doesn’t seem to bother Jaemin too much. They’re usually holding hands or giggling to themselves whenever they’re in the same room, but today Jaemin is holding a knife in his pocket and Renjun isn’t smiling.

 

Doyoung comes in to ask if he wants someone to take over for him. The boredom is almost enough for him to agree, but he knows they’re all busy and occupied with the Ten affair, so he says he’s fine and reminds Doyoung to take care. He’s not sure why he adds the last part. Doyoung isn’t any of his business.

 

Then at half past noon, the door creaks open, and Taeil turns around just in time to see Sicheng peer inside. He’s dressed in all black, different from the shirt with the penguin patterns he’d been sporting earlier when he came to look for Kun, and there’s a gun holster strapped to his waist.

 

“Yuta-hyung is looking for you,” he says, to the boys. They hesitate only for a minute before they’re scrambling to exit the room.

 

And then it’s just them. The ventilation that seems to have a life of its own, the steady beeping from the machines, a sleeping Jeno, an unsmiling, armed Sicheng, and awkward, unsure Taeil.

 

In theory, the fact that Sicheng was avoiding him should have been a relief, since that was what he wanted in the first place. He didn’t need to get hung up on Sicheng, since he knows he’s going to have to cut this part out of his life and move on when this whole thing blows over. The last thing he needs is to catch feelings like a lovesick idiot and then be upset when said feelings aren’t returned. He should be smart, precise, focused and the fact that Sicheng is looking at him like he’s trying to read him inside out really shouldn’t get to him this much.

 

Think with your head.

 

“Hi.” Sicheng says. It comes out quiet, like an exhale of air. He looks exactly like all the elite gang members in the ER who come to collect their low order informants after gang fights, leather on leather and hair pushed back and the letters NEO stitched onto the sleeve of his jacket. It’s a sharp, searing reminder of how different their worlds are.

 

Taeil clears his throat. “Hey.”

 

“I wasn’t — I wasn’t avoiding you.” He says, awkwardly. He shoves his hand into his pockets, finally plopping down on the chair in the corner like he’s seating himself for an interrogation. “I just had work? Yeah, I don’t know it what I did was work, but they needed me in the eleventh floor for a bit. Sorry about that.”

 

“That’s okay,” Taeil sits down too, watching Jeno’s chest rise and fall as he sleeps quietly. “I wasn’t reading too much into it.”

 

Lies.

 

“Oh,” Sicheng’s lips curl up, into what’s a half smile, “that’s fair. Are you mad?”

 

“I just told you that I wasn’t reading into it,” Taeil says, patiently. It’s stifling in the room all of a sudden.

 

Sicheng is looking at him like he wants to read Taeil like an open book again. “I meant about the kiss, Doc.”

 

Yep, there it is.

 

“I’m not mad.” That’s for sure. Taeil knows what he’s feeling, and the rush of heat that swept over him every time he thought of the kiss wasn’t anger. “I’m confused, sure, but not mad.”

 

“That’s okay.” The heart monitor continues beeping steadily. Jeno shuffles and there’s light spilling into the room from the corner of the open door, and yet all Taeil is looking at is the golden flecks in his eyes. “I guess I haven’t been clear about my —“ he pauses for a minute, trying to grasp the right word, and then finally decides on saying, “intentions.”

 

Taeil watches Jeno flip over and let out a loud snore. “Intentions?” He repeats, just to clarify if that’s what he really heard.

 

“Yeah,” Sicheng says. “Intentions. You know, like how I timed the kiss terribly and it was an awkward encounter for both of us so now I feel like we deserve a do-over.”

 

And oh, there it was. That stupid, elated soar his heart does whenever Sicheng as much as acknowledged his exitence anywhere. The stupid heat that crawls down his neck and nestles itself on his skin like it wants everyone to know the effect momentary validation has on him.

 

“That’s not an intention,” Taeil says. He’s surprised his voice doesn’t come out less strangled.

 

“My bad, then.” Sicheng’s eyes are sharp, like the edge of a silvery new scalpel on a shining tray. It’s adrenaline-inducing, the way he looks at Taeil. He’s four seats away but the look in his eyes keeps Taeil steeled to the ground in spite of the chaos in his own head. “I intend to give us the do-over we deserve.”

 

In Jungwoo’s terms, Taeil has no idea where this confident gay energy is coming from.

 

“And if I don’t want the do-over?” Taeil will admit to saying that only because he wanted to see the look on Sicheng’s face.

 

“Then you wouldn’t have kissed me back that day.” The effect is underwhelming. Sicheng barely blinks at that. “You wanted it too.”

 

The didn’t you? remains suspended mid-air like a pin hanging off a thin thread.

 

“Yeah,” Taeil finally says, and the corner of Sicheng’s lips curl up into a full, blinding smile. The rational part of Taeil’s brain adds, “You don’t even know me, though.”

 

A beat passes.

 

“I’m open to learn.” The words have a saccharine sweet lilt to them. He pauses, and then says, “And anyway, we’re stuck here indefinitely. What could possibly go wrong with trying to get to know each other while we wait for the gang to figure out how to solve the issue of the people trying to kill me?”

 

“Lots of things,” Taeil says.

 

“I’m not hearing a no.” Sicheng says.

 

Taeil can’t help the way his lips twitch slightly. “That’s because I didn’t say no.”

 

“It’s settled then,” Sicheng shrugs, and it’s ridiculous, how confident and brave he can be when he tries, but when he smiles and says, “Get to know each other and then a do-over?”

 

“If you’re sure,” Taeil says.

 

“I’ve never been more sure of anything else,” and for some reason, his eyes seem to sparkle even more when Taeil hesitantly smiles at him.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> XIAOHENYANG? XIAOHENYANG.
> 
> (also happy birthday to amel!! she’s a bad bitch and i wanted to post this for her birthday but then i couldn’t get it done fast enough so i’m posting it three days later. pls say sike.)
> 
> also: this chapter ended happy only so i could make the next few ones hella sad uwu


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